Stop Lying To Yourself! Kyle Creek AKA The Captain

[00:00:00] The fear of rejection in my life has probably caused me more turmoil than anything I've experienced. The best you're ever gonna feel is dedicating yourself to something that requires you to put in a lot of fucking work.

[00:00:12] So, I think when you don't feel that sense of belonging at a young age, you internalize it as something being wrong with you. Yeah.

[00:00:17] You don't realize that it's because you're not in the right environment or you don't realize you don't have the mature brain to look at it and think, I just, this isn't the right place for me.

[00:00:26] There are so many subject matter experts who devote their lives to things that you could learn about that will change the trajectory of your life, but instead, you're focusing on politicians and freaking out over who you're gonna vote for, the f*** out of here. That's how I feel.

[00:00:40] Kyle Creek, AKA The Captain, but we're now going by Kyle Creek. Yeah, moving forward, I mean it's gonna probably go that direction more and more. Okay. Well, welcome to this podcast. I'm so excited to have you. I've been sharing your work for years and years. You know this.

[00:01:01] Yeah. But I'm so excited to have you because I feel like everything that you post, everything that you say is so valuable and can really change the trajectory of people's lives for the better.

[00:01:15] You're different and you say things that aren't necessarily in alignment with the norm or any particular tribe. And that's what makes you so special and I feel like that's why everyone on the internet just seems to gravitate towards you.

[00:01:32] But I wanted to talk to you, I wanted to begin by talking to you about how you got here. Well, first of all, I appreciate the support.

[00:01:41] I have seen you share my work many times over the years and that's kind of how I decided to reach out to you.

[00:01:46] And also like the idea of the whole trying to avoid tribalism thing that is something that I've been very deliberate with trying not to pigeonhole myself into a certain camp but also trying not to encourage people to do that.

[00:01:59] I mean, especially the past few years, I had a lot of people that would write to me and say, you know, why haven't you chosen sides? Why don't I know what side you're on? And I would always tell them I'm on the side of the people.

[00:02:09] Like the fact you don't know what side I'm on shows that I'm trying to think critically about things and also encourage people to do that themselves. And that's really how my whole career kind of started.

[00:02:20] We were talking before this, but I've wanted to be a writer pretty much my whole life. I grew up reading a lot of books. My mom always encouraged me to read.

[00:02:28] And when I got into college, I majored in business but didn't really know what I wanted to do. I mean, I wanted to be a drummer in a metal band. That was like my goal in life was to be in a band. I can see that.

[00:02:38] That was my goal in life was to be in a band. I was like music. I had a real affinity for rock music growing up, but I figured I should probably go to school in case that didn't happen.

[00:02:48] And when I was in school, in my classes, I was always getting A's on my papers and encouraged me to want to write more. I was like, damn, I'm actually pretty good at this. And it was because growing up, my mom encouraged me to read.

[00:03:00] My mom would often give me allowance if I'd write her book reports based on what I read. And so I kind of just grew up doing that. And so in college, when I was like, this is all I want to do.

[00:03:10] And people ask me now what I would do if I wasn't a writer and I honestly can't wrap my head around that idea. There's nothing I could even picture myself doing that would appeal to me as much as writing.

[00:03:22] And so I've wanted to do it pretty much my whole life. But it's hard. When I was first starting out, I couldn't get people to let me write for them for free. I was offering to write articles for the local paper. I grew up in Utah.

[00:03:35] I was writing like music reviews, like bands that would come into town kind of merging my love for music and writing. And they would turn me down. They would print my pieces. And I kept trying to make a living as a writer.

[00:03:47] I ended up living at home until I was 27 because I just could not get work that was like sustainable. And I finally got into advertising when I was 27. And I became a copywriter at an agency.

[00:04:00] And that was when I had enough money to really move out for the first time. And I'd interviewed with every agency in Salt Lake. And I heard verbatim from one of the creative directors.

[00:04:10] He said, you're a really talented writer, but you have your fingers tattooed so I can't hire you because you won't present well to clients. And I smear thinking this is so fucking stupid.

[00:04:20] Like anything that's going to not hire me for that reason is just something I don't want to do. Because you have tattoos and you're not going to present well? I had my fingers tattooed. I was verbatim told that.

[00:04:28] And so I interviewed with one more agency and I told the creative director said, if you don't hire me, I'm just going to say fuck it to this whole dream of writing. I'm going to find something else to do because you said that to the guy.

[00:04:39] Yeah, I said because no one else is giving me a chance and I'm sick of it. And I was just like yelling and pissed off. And he hired me because of that. He's like, I loved it. He's like, I could tell all you wanted to do is write.

[00:04:48] So that got my start as like a professional writer. And I wrote a lot of commercials. I've probably written a couple hundred TV commercials.

[00:04:56] I've done a lot of work in like the branding space for hotels and I ended up moving to New York City for a while working as a writer there for a lot of hospitality brands. But on the side, I always wanted to write more.

[00:05:07] I want to write the kind of stuff you were talking about. I wanted to write like, you know, stuff that felt emotional or I wanted to write things that felt like they actually helped people.

[00:05:14] I love that I was making money as a writer, but at the same time I was doing this kind of selling stuff. And it wasn't that fulfilling. So I started trying to make my scripts like funny.

[00:05:25] I started trying to write like really clever jokes into my work and clients would often reject it because they thought my jokes were too crude. And I remember thinking, ah, these jokes are they're too good to die. So I'm going to start tweeting these.

[00:05:39] And so I take like my jokes that clients would reject and I'd tweet them. I'd make like a really good observation or like I'd one of the jokes specifically is I was working for a furniture company.

[00:05:48] And I wrote a joke about comparing finding a coffee table to finding the ideal mate. Like you don't want someone too big or too small. You want someone to fit your style, but in the end what you really want is something stable.

[00:06:00] I mean, you want a coffee table that's stable and you want a relationship that's stable. And I thought it was a clever joke. They didn't like it. So I tweeted it and it did pretty well.

[00:06:06] And so it got to the point that I would start taking my really good observations. I'll keep them for myself. I would tweet them. I'd give my clients like my B and C grade work. And that's kind of how my Twitter started.

[00:06:19] It was me just as I was working, I was taking stuff that I felt was relevant and just sharing it online. But you had two different identities because you Kyle Creek different than the captain. Yeah. So that's it.

[00:06:34] It's because it was so hard for me to get a job as a writer when I finally did. I was so grateful. I didn't want to fuck it up.

[00:06:40] I can remember my first job paid me $52,000 a year and I was able to afford a truck in an apartment. And I just remember thinking, holy shit, I'm going to go to bars my buddies.

[00:06:50] And like when girls would ask what I did for work, I was like, I'm a writer. Like it felt so cool that I could afford a lifestyle as a writer and I did not want to lose that.

[00:06:59] And so when I started tweeting and because a lot of my opinions as you've probably seen over the years are fairly controversial. And I didn't want my online work to affect my professional career.

[00:07:11] So I went by the name of the captain because in my early 20s, my buddies had started calling me the captain because they said going out and partying with me was like getting on a boat and waiting for it to sink.

[00:07:21] Because I was really rowdy and I had just a lot of stuff I was working through. A lot of insecurity is what it was. And so when I went out, I was I kind of pride in myself on how many bars I could get kicked out of.

[00:07:32] That's just what I was. Wow, you were that guy. Yeah, I was a terrible person. Were you a terrible person? Did you actually feel that you were a terrible person? No, I was a terrible person. I was very insecure. Highly relatable by the way.

[00:07:43] I think most of us are insecure and don't want to admit it but we'll get into it. And I think most people you see that are very outlandish in their behavior like that are also insecure.

[00:07:52] The real reason when I look back on it while I was like that is it made me unapproachable to people in the sense that they would look at me and go, God, that guy just doesn't care. And I wanted it to be very obvious that I didn't care.

[00:08:05] And in doing so, it actually just kind of showed people I cared too much. And so I was always trying to get kicked out. I was always trying to get into fights. I did a lot of drugs.

[00:08:15] I got really into cocaine for a while and I just love the way it made me feel. And I remember people used to tell me like I used to come here to LA often to hang out with some of my friends here.

[00:08:25] And they would say, you know, my friends, they're afraid to hang out with you because they've heard stories of you. And I remember thinking that was like a badge of honor. I was like, oh, fuck yeah, like no one can hang with me.

[00:08:33] And so that's when I got that nickname. I think they grew out of that eventually at least that side of myself with the nickname has stuck around. And so that's why I started using online. I didn't want people to find out who I was in my professional career.

[00:08:46] And when I moved to New York, I had a pretty decent following then as the captain. And I was sitting at a meeting or remember this with it was a Ritz Carlton property that I was coming on as a creative director for.

[00:08:58] And I was sitting around a table of a bunch of executives probably in their fifties and sixties. And one of the guys lands over to me and says, you know, I'm a big fan of your work. And I thought he was talking about like my advertising portfolio.

[00:09:09] And he's like, no, like my wife and I follow you on Instagram. We think it's awesome. And that was the first time like my world is really intersected like that.

[00:09:16] And then it got to a point where I started getting work because of that in my advertising career the past few years before I left my I left my advertising job full time in 2018.

[00:09:26] But the last year to I would get work because people knew who I was online. And so they would hire me to work for their bar. I was doing a lot of bar hotels.

[00:09:35] And so in that space it was very advantageous for me to be known as someone who's kind of out there and outlandish because they wanted me to work on their nightclubs essentially kind of thing.

[00:09:44] So but really, I've always just wanted to write books even when I had my advertising career. I'm already telling my friends like my goal is to write one book a year and just disappear.

[00:09:56] Like I wanted to show up, turn in a manuscript to a publisher and then just disappear for a year and come back and like that's kind of you know, you're asking me before we were in the stairwell coming down from getting drinks.

[00:10:05] You asked me, you know, what do you what's going to happen with like your your your following? And really, I told you, I just want to write books. I want to write me left alone. I want to write really deep meaningful stuff.

[00:10:17] And that's why I'm dropping that captain off the book I'm working on now, which started as a memoir.

[00:10:24] And that's why I'm able to kind of talk about all this stuff, my insecurities and my 20s and stuff because the past year I've been processing that stuff pretty heavily working on this this current book I'm doing.

[00:10:33] It started as a memoir but it's evolved into something much more than that. I think it's more powerful now. It still does have a lot of my personal story in there. I couldn't imagine putting the captain name on that.

[00:10:43] I think it would be a major disservice to how much work I've poured into that book but also just the the impact that I hope the books going to have if they had the captain I honestly feel sick to my stomach. You know what's interesting?

[00:10:55] I talked to a lot of artists, whether it's musicians, writers, whatever creatives and it's crazy how many people start with a pseudonym or something else because it's really hard to be vulnerable. It's exactly what it is.

[00:11:11] It's like you write and come out as you and then have this mode of expression because it's I think it's because it's scary to be rejected. You put yourself out there and it's like what if people don't like it?

[00:11:24] But if they don't like it as this person who isn't me then whatever, it doesn't matter. It's not as embarrassing. That's exact. Yeah, you know that exact. I've actually told someone that before. I remember I used to when I used to write something that wasn't received well online.

[00:11:37] I would be like, oh that was the captain that wasn't me. So like it's okay if people didn't like it. Yeah, it really was.

[00:11:43] It's a good little barrier and I like that you said a fear of rejection because I was actually thinking on the drive over here like oddly enough. Because I'm always processing what I'm writing now.

[00:11:52] The fear of rejection in my life has probably caused me more turmoil than anything I've experienced. And it started at a young age. So I grew up in a Mormon household. My whole family is very Mormon. I wasn't when I was 14.

[00:12:04] I kind of totally pushed away from the church. And from then on I never really felt accepted by my parents. I have a great relationship with them. We never stopped talking but I never really felt like they accepted me because I wasn't a part of their religion anymore.

[00:12:17] And so I always had this fear of rejection from other people because my brothers both stayed in the church and I was the only one that wasn't active. And so I never had a, like my teenage years I never hung out with my brothers.

[00:12:27] We were polar opposites in our lifestyle. They were going to church getting ready to go on a more mission and I was out smoking weed and selling drugs with my friends and stuff. Because I was just on a mission to rebel so far away from what I knew.

[00:12:40] So the fear of rejection is largely what drove my lifestyle and it absolutely has been more painful than anything else because it's just caused me to do things that I know weren't me at the time and they've almost always just ended badly. When did you change though?

[00:13:03] Because you describe yourself as this guy who was like doing cocaine. Becoming a father. That was it? Yeah, it was that easy. But you still found a woman and had a relationship as well. Yeah, we broke up for six months.

[00:13:17] We first got together because I wasn't ready to pull out of that lifestyle. I was living in New York City. She lived in LA. We met in a bar in New York and she ended up spending the weekend with me because she got drunk at Mr. Flight.

[00:13:31] It was awesome. It was the first time I really felt like I could be just myself with her because she just made it feel so easy. So we did a long distance thing for about a year and then I could see she's pulling away from me

[00:13:43] and I just wasn't committing. I was still trying to have my lifestyle of being free and kind of very independent. And I decided to move to LA to pursue something with her but I just moving to LA was culture shock for me

[00:13:56] in the sense that when I was in New York, this is when I left my advertising role too. I was running an office in New York and I had a lot of responsibility and I was constantly in demand.

[00:14:08] And when I left all that behind I came to LA and I kind of felt like I had nothing. And I went from living in the middle of Manhattan to Agora Hills and I just felt like, Holy fuck, I'm in the middle of the desert.

[00:14:17] I feel so isolated. And my way of escaping myself previously was just drinking and traveling all the time. Like I prided myself on how often I could be out of town and how hard I was to get a hold of.

[00:14:30] Like I thought it was a symbol of my importance. And so I was trying to constantly just be gone and be on the road and be at bars and have my friends never be able to kind of keep tabs on me.

[00:14:38] And so when I came to LA, I had to sit with myself for the first time in probably over a decade because my career trajectory happened pretty quickly. And I wasn't ready to get out of my shit. And so she broke up with me.

[00:14:55] It was the right move at the time. And we ended up getting back together six months later and then COVID hit and I went through it kind of all over again because during those six months we broke up

[00:15:05] I got a publishing deal and I had like some things going off in my writing career were starting to work out for me, but then we got back together and everything shut down. I was like, fuck. And I just didn't have myself to fall back on.

[00:15:19] And that's really where the captain thing harmed me too is because a lot of my friends at the time didn't know me as anything other than the captain. I had like a couple buddies from high school that knew me as Kyle,

[00:15:32] but pretty much my entire network was captain related and people just called me captain and called me cap and no one called me Kyle. So when I needed to fall back on Kyle, he wasn't even there. I'd forgotten who that person was. I buried him so long ago.

[00:15:47] And so I went through like major, major depression. How'd you get out of that? It was it was it was hard. I went through I went through a major spell depression and I got to the point that I actually was

[00:15:59] I always suicidal and I remember I was writing. I was writing a note and I was kind of justifying it as like a writing exercise. I'm going to tell myself I was just practicing, but it really was when I look back on it.

[00:16:13] A note to my nephews because I have two nephews and I didn't want them to to go through life the way I did. And so I kind of wrote a minoc.

[00:16:21] I didn't have a son at the time and I was basically kind of warning them against where I felt I went wrong in life and how I got to a place where I was that depressed.

[00:16:30] And I remember writing that I remember thinking I remember sitting back and going like holy shit, like I I mean this like I really realized how deep and depression I was. So I decided to go totally sober and not run for myself anymore. I got off social media.

[00:16:48] You wrote the note, but you didn't do anything. No, no, no, no. I wrote the note and that was enough a wake up call for me because it it I knew that I was serious behind my intention. What did it say?

[00:16:58] Just a lot of the kind of warning stuff about you know kind of what we talked about here about how my fear of rejection kind of controlled my life and how my lack of vulnerability caused me to be so insecure

[00:17:12] and how I pursued a lot of the wrong things in life. I just wanted to be important so badly in my early 20s because I felt like I didn't have that as a kid that I just I saw attention more than connection for sure.

[00:17:27] There's a there's a clip of Joe Rogan talking about all of the people who get into comedy and want to be actors and he says it's because most of them felt almost all of them felt a void in their childhood

[00:17:42] and that finally when they have the spotlight on them, they think okay now I'm a something person. The spotlight's on me and it's a theme that I noticed with almost everybody. I think everybody wants to know that they're important and that they matter everybody.

[00:17:57] Yeah, it's a human need to want to feel important. It is and in to feel a sense of belonging. I think the common thread that I see with what you just said, you know, you grew up Mormon.

[00:18:08] So you a lot of us grow up in communities, societies that are not really for us. You know what I mean? Whether it's religious or a school or any type of environment where they're telling you

[00:18:23] you need to do this, you need to follow these rules, you need to believe this and then when you feel different from that, you're like okay well I'm not accepted here. I'm not in belonging somewhere else. I need to do this somewhere else.

[00:18:35] And that's where I notice that people veer off the path and start doing drugs and whatever their thing is. Well, the thing is too, I think when you don't feel a sense of belonging at a young age you internalize it as something being wrong with you.

[00:18:49] You don't realize that it's because you're not in the right environment or you don't realize you don't have the mature brain to look at it and think this isn't the right place for me. You think you're wrong

[00:18:58] and you think there's something that you did fucked it all up. Did your parents contribute to that feeling and amplified and made it worse? Unintentionally, yeah. That's the other thing that I feel like our generation is really into personal development

[00:19:12] and therapy and inner child work and things like that. But all of us had parents who didn't know anything. There's no instruction manual for how to be a parent and it's like all of us had parents that projected this idea of what they wanted us to be.

[00:19:28] And what you're sharing I just feel like is so common among... I think the thing is too, my parents were kids raising kids. Like when my dad was my age I was 11, my other brother would have been 12 or 13 and my younger brother would have been 8.

[00:19:43] I mean, I didn't have my son until I was 35. My dad started having kids in his early 20s. And like I said earlier, my early 20s are when the captain was birth. That was me being a rowdy individual. I couldn't imagine being a parent then.

[00:19:56] I had so much to figure out and process in my own life and so it's allowed me to hold a lot of grace with my parents knowing they were really young. They didn't really know what they were doing.

[00:20:04] But more so the kind of stuff that really affected me was the religion side of things because I never saw life advice from my parents ever because their advice always revolved around reading a scripture or saying your prayers.

[00:20:18] And since I didn't identify with that, I didn't want to hear it. I was like, I needed someone to talk to me as a human. I needed to have my father talk to me as a father and son and not feel like I was dismissed.

[00:20:30] And he wasn't intentionally doing that. It's just what he thought was the right thing to do is to tell me, oh if you're feeling lost pray about it or if you need some answers go read your scriptures. Go read the Bible or something. That's not what I needed.

[00:20:42] I needed my dad to relate to me and be like, oh yeah, I remember feeling that way when I was a teenager and it sucked. And here's what that's what I needed. I didn't get that. So I never sought them as advice.

[00:20:51] And so I kind of had this me against the world mentality pretty much my entire life. I actually tattooed the word solitude across my fingers. That's like, that's what I tattooed on myself in my early 20s.

[00:21:03] And again, I think it was kind of my way of trying to justify the way I was living and also keep people at a distance. When I met my girlfriend in New York, she actually asked what my fingers said. And I told her and she said,

[00:21:14] who are you trying to convince me or you? That was her response to it. And I was like, fuck man, she's got my number. She knows. And so that's what made it very hard for me to kind of work past that stuff

[00:21:28] because I felt like my fierce independence made me successful. I think if I didn't have that I wouldn't have fought as hard to be known as a writer and I probably wouldn't have fought as hard to make a career for myself.

[00:21:38] It was because I had that chip in my shoulder. So it was kind of like a catch 22 because when I did get in a relationship and I did find out I was going to become a dad, like I had to get rid of all that. It wasn't planned.

[00:21:50] Yeah. No, it wasn't. And it spiraled me really bad into depression because I just wasn't ready for it. I remember thinking, you know, I'm too fucked up to raise a kid. Like I'm not going to be able to help this kid out. I can barely help myself.

[00:22:05] It's interesting that you're saying that, that you've felt like you were too fucked up because I've been following you for years. And if someone's just reading your tweets, they're like, this guy is not fucked up at all. This guy has all the answers. Yeah.

[00:22:20] And a lot of the thing is that I always tell people this majority of my work is me talking to myself. Yeah. And I still stand by pretty much everything I've said, because I do think it's the right way to go.

[00:22:32] And a lot of it is me kind of processing mistakes I made over the years because I would have moments where I felt like I had my life going in a very good direction

[00:22:39] and I would be able to look back and reflect on what I did to change things. And so like, okay, like I actually do feel like I can help some people because I can relate on so many levels.

[00:22:48] But I needed those tweets as much as anyone else did, you know, especially at certain times in my life. And then there was the ones I wrote that were just meant to be, you know, funny and comedy kind of stuff.

[00:22:57] And those are thankfully the ones that became a lot more popular because I can't be called a hypocrite as much for those. Yeah. But yeah, I think most creators or artists like you were saying, you have to derive some inspiration from your own life

[00:23:14] or it just falls very flat. I think the reason why people can relate with my work so much, even though at the time I was dealing with my own stuff is because it was very real. Like everything I said was very real and I meant everything I said

[00:23:26] and I always told people that like even though I put the captain on it, like I mean what I say. Like I think about it deeply when I write something. I don't just like randomly shoot something out there and not think about the responsibility behind it.

[00:23:41] And I felt comfortable doing that because it wasn't my name on it. I felt comfortable probably being more vulnerable as the captain because, you know, he talked about because it wasn't me.

[00:23:50] And so if I did write something that was either disliked or seen as like almost too vulnerable, it's like, oh well, it's that captain character. It was easy for me to dismiss it. Yeah. One of your tweets that I see a lot is the one that's like,

[00:24:01] I want untouchable love. Yeah, I know that one you're talking about. Do you have a memorize? I don't have memorized but I know the one you're talking about. I actually wrote that when my girlfriend and I were broken up and I'd gotten sober.

[00:24:16] I don't think I'd been sober for more than a week for probably 10 years of my life. And so I decided I was going to go sober for at least 100 days just to give myself some clarity.

[00:24:26] And around like day 50, 60, like I think I really started getting like a whole different way of viewing my life and it prevented me from getting away from myself. I also got off social media at the time too.

[00:24:37] So basically I was doing all days reading books and just staring out a fucking wall. What books are you reading? I read The Mastery of Self by Don McGillarie's Jr., which I think is probably one of the most helpful books I've read in my life.

[00:24:49] If you're familiar with the Four Agreements, it's his son. His son wrote The Mastery of Self. And I've actually become good friends with their family now. Oh, jealous. It's cool because Don McGillarie's actually posted a photo of himself holding my book, Speech Therapy.

[00:25:03] And I remember thinking like, what the fuck? Like that was like one of those crazy come full circle moments. But The Mastery of Self helped me a lot. Four Agreements helped me a lot.

[00:25:13] And then I think what was most helpful for me is being off of social media quite honestly. Because social media for me, it fed a lot of that false ego I had.

[00:25:27] And it wasn't just distraction as much as it was an actual place where I derived a lot of my self-worth. And so when I got off it, I had to find like somewhere else to get that self-worth again.

[00:25:40] Like I said, I had to fall back on Kyle and not the captain. During that time period, when I was just kind of processing how I was going to move forward in life, is when I wrote that tweet you're talking about.

[00:25:52] Because I remember thinking, you know, I remember thinking if I do get back together with her, if we do find a way to make this work, like that's how I want it to be. I want it to not be able to be affected by like, you know,

[00:26:04] the whole untouchable idea is that it can't be affected by like external factors. Like other people can't get in your business or things that are happening on the outside of your relationship can affect your relationship is kind of where that was meant to go.

[00:26:16] Yeah, and how did you realize that she was the one for you? Because up until that point, you know, no one else is the mother of your child. She's clearly the one. I think it was when...

[00:26:34] It was actually when I was still living in New York, but there was like a Malibu fire happening here. It was like October of like 2018. It was when those big fires. And she had to evacuate her house.

[00:26:47] I remember that because the fire came right up to her backyard. And I realized I actually cared. Like I was actually worried about her and I was actually afraid something might happen to her. And so I was checking in not just like out of politeness.

[00:26:59] Like I had the genuine concern. And I remember thinking to myself like, holy shit, I actually think I love this woman because I really... I'm like worried for her right now.

[00:27:09] And that was kind of when it clicked to me and I never really felt that way about anyone before. How long into the relationship? That would have been... Six months maybe? Six months for you to realize that? And you had never felt that way before?

[00:27:24] No, I never let anyone that close to me before. Oh wow, okay. I'd been single my entire life until my relationship with her. That was the first relationship I've ever been in. That's insane. Yeah, I was single. I was very deliberately single.

[00:27:38] And I thought it was the right thing to do. And I remember telling women I was dating like listen, this is just me. I'm going to be single like you're not... I'm never going to be in a relationship.

[00:27:51] And I remember putting that out there up front thinking I was doing them a favor. And you look back now and you're like God, that's just so weak. But at the time it just felt like what I needed to do.

[00:28:02] And I felt like I just needed to be honest. At that point they could kind of make their decision if they were going to try and pursue something and know that it wasn't going to go anywhere or not.

[00:28:11] So I was just trying to be really honest with my intentions. But I just really... I care about things too deeply. And I knew that I would get hurt if I was in a relationship because that's just kind of person I am.

[00:28:26] I could care about things a lot. It was what scared me about becoming a father. I actually wrote about this in my newsletter a couple weeks back.

[00:28:37] The thing that scared me most about being a dad is I knew that I was going to love that little boy so much that it was going to open me up to all sorts of pain. Because watching him hurt himself or just thinking about something happening to him

[00:28:51] is probably the worst feeling you could ever have. And I figured, oh if you're never a parent you don't have to feel that. It's like someone said to me, the moment you bring a dog home you have to accept the fact that someday that dog's going to die.

[00:29:03] And I was like what a depressing way to look at it. I mean I know it's true but that shouldn't be a reason why you shouldn't get a dog. Because something bad is going to happen in life and never will be with everything

[00:29:13] but you should still enjoy every moment before that. And so the same reason I was avoiding a relationship. I didn't want to get hurt. I was afraid of becoming a dag because I didn't want to get hurt again.

[00:29:23] And it was a lot of my just unwillingness to be vulnerable. Like I said, that fear of rejection and also just the fear of emotionally connecting to something that I avoided for many years in my life. Wow. I'm probably doing that now.

[00:29:37] I think a lot of people do and you don't realize it. Yeah. Just until you said it right now. I'm like wow that's probably the exact reason. Another reason I know this is because I've been working on this book for the past year

[00:29:48] and I've been processing things very deeply for a long time. Yeah. And I didn't come to the realizations myself until I would write these memoir pages about my life in my 20s and deeply analyzing why I was the way I was

[00:30:00] and then I'm like it would just hit me and I'd be like oh my god. Like there's some mornings like I'll be sitting at my laptop and I'll just cry because I'll come to realizations that I just buried or just thought were not the truth

[00:30:13] and they'll just hit me and I'm just like fuck. Like this makes so much sense. And that's why it would break my heart to put anything other than my real name on my books moving forward because I do think there's so,

[00:30:28] I have so much emotion and tied into these books. Do you feel like you would cut yourself off from emotion in your 20s? Totally. I cut myself off from emotion in the moment I left the Mormon church. Wow. When I was a teenager.

[00:30:42] The moment I didn't feel accepted by my parents, I cut myself off. I remember I came home with my years pierced and I remember my mom and I think she feels very bad about this now.

[00:30:56] She wanted to kick me out of the house and I think I was 16 and I remember just thinking like wow, that's the strength of my relationship with my mother. Like if I have earrings she doesn't want me to be her son anymore

[00:31:09] and I remember just thinking like wow that's fucked up and my dad fought for me though. My dad's like, I remember my dad saying no, I don't care if he has years pierced he probably used some other examples.

[00:31:21] He's my son and I'm never going to kick him out and I remember thinking like fuck yeah my dad went to bat for me so I always had a stronger relationship with my dad because he went to bat for me in that moment

[00:31:30] and I don't even know if I've ever even talked to my mother about that but that like one moment I really, really shelled off from her and I think it also kind of caused me to just shell off from women.

[00:31:44] They say quite often the relationship you have later in life has to do with your relationship with your mother or your father is the reason why women date certain kinds of men and the reason why men date certain kinds of women it has to do with that bond

[00:31:55] and I remember just feeling so just rejected by my mom and I was like fuck man I'm never going to let a woman do that to me again and I remember thinking that at like 16

[00:32:06] and that just totally drove me down the path of like just like that fierce independence where I thought that it was, I thought it was me just being strong but it was really just me being afraid. When you look back on the way you were parented

[00:32:24] now you are a parent what are the types of lessons you've taken from your own childhood that you apply in your fatherhood? I never want my kids not feel accepted and I never want them to not feel like he can come to me

[00:32:39] I wanted to know that even if he does something completely fucking stupid or he does something just terribly wrong I want him to be able to know that he can come to me and I think if I have that, that right there

[00:32:53] signifies that everything else in the relationship has been done correctly I think if you feel like you can do that with your parent it's done right so whether he's 17 or whether he's 40 and he just makes a mistake

[00:33:07] I wanted to know that his dad is not going to judge him and I'm just like alright look how do we figure this out let's figure this out like I want him to have that feeling like he can't come to me

[00:33:17] because that's probably the feeling that I didn't have that affected me the most because when I was going say at school I had friends or something I was having an issue with or I did have a crush on a girl and I might have ended badly

[00:33:31] and I kind of had my feelings hurt but I didn't talk to anyone I didn't talk to my brothers I didn't talk to my friends I didn't talk to my parents I internalized all of that shit for all of my teenagers all of my 20s

[00:33:42] I didn't talk to anybody nobody knew who nobody knew about my personal life like my mom my mom actually when I was I think I was 26 or 27 she actually pulled me aside one time at family dinner and she she's like Kyle why

[00:34:00] why have you never bought a girl home and I was like I just I don't I'm not serious like that and she's like she's like it's okay if you're gay and I'm here thinking I'm not I told her like I'm not mom I just

[00:34:16] I don't get serious with anybody she's like so what do you do with all these girls that you're always with and then she goes oh I don't want to know but she got to the point like no one knew my business like my own mother like I said

[00:34:32] my own mother questioned my sexuality because I just never let anyone know what was going on and that was hard it was hard like my friends never knew what was going on like I have friends that I've been really tight with since like our teenage years

[00:34:45] I think I have three buddies that I've been friends with for probably almost 20 years at this point and they had no idea about any of my depression or struggles until probably four years ago I remember one of my buddies actually said to me he said

[00:35:08] he's like you know Kyle I used to look up to you because I remember you were always very good at like closing doors on people and I remember actually thinking one time I think he had just been through a breakup

[00:35:18] and he was thinking like how does Kyle do this because I moved a lot and I could like close someone off and not talk to them again like that and he was like I don't know how Kyle can just not attach to things

[00:35:30] I wish I was more like Kyle and I'm here telling him it was like dude like it was the hardest thing ever for me and I just told myself I had to do that and so I just closed off to everybody and he was like man

[00:35:42] I remember thinking like he told me he's like either Kyle is really strong or he's really fucked up is what his the answer he got to in his mind was about it but yeah that was until like two or three years ago he probably said that to me

[00:35:56] and I've known him since I was 17 I think that makes sense to me only because you know we're in this era where our generation is just constantly working on themselves you know why they gravitate towards writers like you but there's this whole you need to set boundaries thing

[00:36:14] that's become very popular and I think people could look at someone like you at that moment in time and be like oh well he's just really good at setting boundaries those weren't boundaries though they were barricades yeah there's a big difference

[00:36:27] I'm probably horrible at setting boundaries now honestly that's probably what I need to work on more I think we have a tendency to over correct in life and I think I've over corrected a bit to where I was so close to off for a while

[00:36:40] that the past few years I've kind of gone the other direction and now I have this whole new style of stress in my life where I over commit to things or you're like very vulnerable yeah like I over share to people now

[00:36:53] or I just I my real problem is over committing like I over commit to things and I care about everything I get involved in like I said like I care really deeply about things and so if I agreed to work on a project

[00:37:06] or if like I decide someone's going to be like okay I'm gonna let this friendship happen with this person I just get really invested in them I need to be better I need to be better at having boundaries now because I am too busy

[00:37:19] a lot of the time especially now with like you know my little farm I'm setting up and my son and you know my family and everything so I'll find that happy medium but I just haven't found it yet I don't think yeah you said that you

[00:37:32] when you started writing you started crying yeah sometimes I do that yeah like what what are the types of things that bring that that type of emotion out of you basically what we just talked about come to that realization that I felt very rejected by my mother

[00:37:50] and when she wanted to kick me out of the house was something I didn't really come to the realization until recently and stuff like that just hurts when you finally realize that moment affected a lot of my life and it caused me a lot of pain and

[00:38:06] it's stuff like that will just hit you and then you feel kind of guilty like I feel guilty for for almost being harsh on her in that sense like did I overreact it was something that I didn't need to to close off so much

[00:38:21] of my life because I know my mom probably wanted to be a lot more involved in my life in my 20s and I'm sure my whole family did I just wouldn't allow it and so I feel kind of guilty that I closed people off for so long

[00:38:37] did your wife help you be more vulnerable totally yeah she still does it's probably still one of her biggest issues with me is that I'm not vulnerable enough at times really I haven't eased it's very easy for me to get stuck in my head

[00:38:53] particularly when I'm writing about subjects like when I'm writing about something I don't want to talk about it until I've processed it correctly so if I'm in the middle of processing something for a week I'll just be very constantly thinking about it and shut down

[00:39:07] and like I said it's still a happy medium I have to find that makes sense to me I'm like that too in my own friendships where I feel like until I've processed what I want to say or like sometimes you have the conversation in your head

[00:39:23] before you actually have the conversation you're like imagining the scenario oh totally everyone does that and I replay it over and over again and then I'll imagine their reaction and I'm like I'm not going to share that and so I go back and I try to figure out

[00:39:37] how I want to say things because I don't want to damage the friendship or I don't want conflict or I don't want something so it's like how do you but how often do things work out much better than you feared though pretty often but I think

[00:39:55] this makes me so emotional but I think the same way like you had pain from your relationships my wound is the friendship wound where like I had a friend when I was 18 who just like literally distanced herself from me cut me off from the entire

[00:40:15] friend group and I had no friends and I had to like just rebuild my entire friend group and so anytime I'm like close to a friend if there's a conflict because I had told her like I called her I tried to resolve it

[00:40:29] I was very emotional I felt so closer I called her and I'm like why don't you I left her voice I'm like why do you want to be my friend anymore and she got even bitchier girls can be very mean especially at that age. I've heard stories.

[00:40:41] Yeah and so anytime there's like a conflict with a friend or any situation where if I imagine myself talking about it and I get emotional I'm like I'm not gonna miss this conversation. Like I'm even I'm thinking of one now where like I have a friendship

[00:40:57] that I just I will not even approach the person I haven't talked to them in months but they're very special to me but because she rejected my vulnerability I'm like oh my god it's gonna happen again. Yeah. But what's funny is I opened your book the other day

[00:41:13] I don't think it was speech therapy I think it was is this the right one? The history one? The hit yeah it's here we go hold on a second this one fucking history it was something about I don't know if I can get to it that fast

[00:41:32] It's only what it is I might be able to Okay something about like BFF backstabbing. Yeah that's exactly what the chapter is called. That is right. That's in speech therapy though Oh okay well I I literally take your books and go back and forth

[00:41:44] and it's not like a linear thing. That's what they're meant to be read. Yeah. Especially this book it's something that you can turn to whenever those situations happen to you that's kind of like it's not a book you

[00:41:54] read cover to cover I mean a lot of people do when they first get it but it's meant to go back to you like if you're dealing with that in the moment you go read those two pages. Exactly so that so I know where to go

[00:42:04] and I remember reading what you wrote there and it was something like you know sometimes you get distant and then they'll either come back and you grow strong you know you grow stronger than ever and the friendship is better or sometimes

[00:42:18] you never hear from them and then I read that and I'm like okay well I don't have to approach this right now but again I'm operating a lot out of fear and I know that but it's crazy how everything that has happened to you in your childhood

[00:42:34] the way that it seeps into your current realities the way it triggers you like I can't even believe something that happened to me when I was 18 years old makes me cry today at 34 I can't even believe it. I don't think many people are aware of that

[00:42:50] I don't think I think the majority of people is probably safe for me to say it have no idea how much their past experiences are affecting their current reality and that's actually I haven't told anyone this that's actually the premise of the book I'm working on

[00:43:06] this one or the new book I've been working on the one that I've been pouring myself into for a year is just how much your past experiences are affecting your life now and how we just live in this state of fear and it just destroys

[00:43:20] your potential essentially. How do you move past it though? By acknowledging it and knowing it's there in the first place The fact you know it's there but I know you're a step ahead of everybody But why do I keep crying? Because you have to force

[00:43:32] yourself to get through it. You have to make a leap You have to be willing to be rejected again that's the problem It's like everything in life you build up a resilience to it the more you do it and I think you get to a point

[00:43:46] and once you know what your your fear is if you don't face it it's just gonna grow. You're right because I'm terrified just as you're saying it. It gets worse the more you think about it and that's why those conversations

[00:43:58] we have in our head can be so dangerous because you make things out to be so much worse than they typically are you'll think about that situation like what happens if I come from my boss about this and you'll sit there and think about it for a week

[00:44:10] and then you actually do it and it'll be like easy and you're like what the fuck and you wasted a week of feeling good stressed out because you just weren't willing to do it similar to what you're going through with now

[00:44:22] it could be months that have been spent dwelling on this that could have been resolved and it's kind of a realization I've come to where I feel like it's you ask me why I cry sometimes when I'm writing I feel like I wasted my 20s

[00:44:34] I look back on my 20s and there's a lot of things I love about them but there's a lot of times that I'm just like fuck man I threw away a lot of years not like looking at it like where people go oh I threw away

[00:44:46] you know years of having fun I had my fun trust me I had enough fun for 10 lifetimes but I look back on it and I go fuck man I missed out on a lot of genuine connection I missed out on a lot of good friendships

[00:45:00] a lot of good conversations and times I could have had with people because I wasn't willing to connect it just makes me sad to think that yeah it is sad because I know there's people who did try to do

[00:45:14] that with me like I can think back to certain friends that tried to have a connection with me and I can remember like particular conversations I had with them where I just like closed off and I know what they were trying to do

[00:45:26] and I think about it and go damn I feel bad that I missed that yeah but it's so beautiful that you know about that now yeah I have to know about it now not only just as a father but if I didn't I would just I honestly

[00:45:42] I don't think I would still be here if I hadn't come to that realization like I really don't when I think back of how depressed I was and how dark the world felt to me at the time I really don't think I'd be here and I

[00:46:00] yeah I wouldn't I just know I wouldn't if I hadn't come to those realizations when I did I don't think I would have pulled out of it wow so you know depression it's different for everybody the way that you got out of it was it chemical

[00:46:16] or was it mostly you just having to work through it in your head again you working through it because look I avoided it I ran from it yeah so you helped yourself work your way out of it and I still am helping myself

[00:46:34] I think a big misconception too with mental health is that once you're out of it it's just like you're just good no I still have moments where I'll go into a hole something will happen or I'll dwell on something too long and I have to kind of

[00:46:50] take what I learned the first time and pull myself out of it again I know how to use them too and I know what works me and what doesn't work for me I rarely rarely drink now I mean I used to drink five or six nights a week

[00:47:04] for a good decade in my life probably and I probably drink five or six times a year now and every time I do I'm like that was stupid no it feels like with the right people I think it's totally fun

[00:47:20] and worth it but I just get hung over so easy I feel my age I used to be able to just function on no sleep I think everyone has that point where they can do that I can't do that anymore especially being a dad

[00:47:32] I've been hung over once as a dad like I had a really bad hangover one time we got a babysitter and we're like oh we're gonna go out and have some fun and I hadn't drank in like months

[00:47:42] and I got really hammered and I'm here waking up hung over and I had to do dad duties hung over and I was like fuck man not again not again but also it's just I want to be there for him because I think to myself what

[00:47:54] if I'm in this state of being hung over and he hurts himself and I'm like in this weird days to where like I'm not there 100% available to help him out and that idea scares me so it just kind of prevents a lot of that in my life

[00:48:10] because I want to make sure that I'm always available for my son that's beautiful I think he's really lucky to have you as a dad yeah I hope he feels that way I hope he feels that way when he's older that's kind of the goal

[00:48:24] we'll see when he's 25 how he feels about me yeah we'll check back then you'll be on episode 21,000 being a parent must change you in so many different ways I'm nowhere I mean I could be close to that don't jinx yourself no I don't want to jinx myself

[00:48:48] and I don't want to push it off I think I've pushed it off long enough I can tell you from experience it's not as hard as you think it is there's stuff that obviously is difficult like once you learn how to

[00:49:02] manage your time though I feel like I'm more productive now as a father than I ever have been and I think I'm writing my best work as a father and that was another fear of mine is that I would become a dad

[00:49:12] and I would get lame or I would get comfortable being a dad I wouldn't be able to write but once I learned how to manage time I just realized how much time I actually wasted before being a dad

[00:49:24] because you still have the luxury of wasting as much anymore and so you have to make use of every spare hour or two you get and so like the amount I'm actually working on I think I'm working on three books simultaneously right now but the amount of work

[00:49:38] that I'm able to do now in the time frame it was unfeasible to me in my 20s when I felt like my career was at my peak especially when I was working and advertising and I was busy like busy as people like to claim they're busy

[00:49:52] and I was lazy honestly I was lazy compared to where I'm at now with my career I feel the same way have you ever been to like AA or Alanon or anything like that? No I hate that stuff because I feel it's too religious

[00:50:04] a lot of people say that I can't get past that my disdain for organized religion still runs so deep because of just what I've seen my family experience at the Mormon church that I can't wrap my head around anything that I think takes power away from people

[00:50:20] So in what way do you feel like organized religion takes power away from people? It is far more um I'd say it's far more shame driven than it is power driven. I think the majority of people that are religious they feel shame

[00:50:38] more often than they feel like genuinely wrong they just they feel judged they feel like they're being watched over they feel like their congregation isn't going to accept them or they're worried about the neighbors think of them and you know particularly with like

[00:50:50] the AA so I have a brother and this isn't like anything I haven't shared before my brother got very heavy into narcotics and um it's interesting my brothers and I all eventually fell away from the Mormon church we stood at different time periods of our life

[00:51:04] and we all kind of you know dealt with it differently but my younger brother got really heavy into narcotics for about a decade and he did like you know narcotics anonymous alcoholics anonymous and all that stuff and here in the way he would talk about it

[00:51:20] would upset me because it's like you understand they're just making you feel even worse for what you've done. How though? Cause I have I have friends who are in it and I find this stuff to be helpful but I want to hear your- If it's helpful to them

[00:51:34] I just think my little brother he it's not empowering him in the sense that he can get through it himself which I strongly believe he can. He has this idea like I can only get through it if I go to my meeting

[00:51:46] every Tuesday I can only get through it if I check in with my sponsor and so now he's dependent upon a whole different belief structure other than just doing it for himself and that's my issue with it as I

[00:52:00] and if it helps people awesome I'm not knocking it I am kind of knocking it but if it helps you good but I just feel like anything that doesn't tell you you can do it on your own if you really

[00:52:16] want to put the work in it's not going to be easier it's going to be hard. Anything that doesn't still kind of empower in you I think is harmful. I hear your point there I think the things that I've seen from it and maybe it's just the way

[00:52:30] that it operates that maybe shouldn't be religious or you know maybe they shouldn't make people feel like you need a sponsor forever whatever. Feel like a cult in it. Okay so I mean I get that I just feel like there's some stuff that they teach

[00:52:44] people and I know because I have friends that are in Al-Anon for example and you know I'll be going through something and they're like hey I actually learned this exercise in Al-Anon it's a resentment exercise and they walk me through it

[00:52:58] and by the time I'm done I'm like holy shit why hasn't anyone told me this not even a therapist has told me this and it has nothing to do with she's not my sponsor she's a friend and she helped me through one situation

[00:53:10] I think what I'm trying to say is you can get all that without Al-Alcox Anonymous all that exists in books I hear you but here's why I think that works and maybe there's another way to do it but the need for belonging is run so deep

[00:53:28] in all of us like think about it you felt so different than these Mormons you grew up with and I felt different from a lot of Persian Jews that I grew up with or whatever it was even though I'm still kind of part of that community

[00:53:44] you feel different but there needs to be a place that you can go where you can walk into a room and feel like people love me and are curious about my life and want to celebrate my wins with me and want to help me through

[00:53:56] the hard times and I feel like that in that sense the environment of AA helps people if you take out I guess the cultish aspects of it I think that's why it has worked for people and I know so many people who are like this changed

[00:54:12] my life because they didn't have a sense of belonging or community anywhere else so it's like I think about this all the time because I agree I think you are the person who can change your life I think you've even written about this

[00:54:24] yeah many times yeah you are the person that can change your life and I wish more people would say that openly again you know how I feel about politics we're on the same page there's no sides I totally understand where you're getting with that

[00:54:38] and that's why we do need to connect and have friends which is kind of in this whole conversation but a good example of what I'm talking about is the movie fight club where I think it's every Nord's main character goes to all the different support groups

[00:54:54] because he's so desperately trying to belong in something because he's running for himself and that's where I have an issue with it because I think I know what my little brother was going through the time because I felt it myself because we've talked about it now

[00:55:12] and it was that feeling like of not belonging once we left the Mormon church that kind of you know sent him down his own spiral of drug use but there is something very dangerous in constantly seeking to belong somewhere I know we all crave it

[00:55:30] and need it but if you can't be with yourself you're setting yourself up just for a crash like some at some point you're gonna be with yourself no matter what you're a part of you need to be prepared for that

[00:55:46] and that's where I'm all about trying to empower people and that's my issue with those programs I just I'm sure there's like times where I mean it's almost like something like if you use it for a year until you learn the right tools then you can you know

[00:56:02] kind of not go as often but I just feel like from what I've heard and what I've seen people just it's almost like you trade one addiction for another like you used to be addicted to alcohol now you're just addicted to likes yeah exactly you're just addicted to

[00:56:18] sitting around and sharing stories and having sad times with these other people that are going through hardships with you and people get addicted to all sorts of weird stuff and I think that's just what it feels like to me it just feels almost like you're replacing

[00:56:34] one obsession with another obsession rather than focusing on what you can do to not feel the need to have that obsession in the first place what's your what's your perception of happiness and suffering well I think they're both related totally um

[00:56:54] I think there's a big push right now you see this a lot online where people say you know you have to you have to suffer in order to be happy and I think what they're getting at there is the most rewarding things

[00:57:06] in life are things you have to work for you know anything worth having is hard um and so I do believe and I have written this before that if to get as happy as you can possibly get you have to be willing to do hard shit

[00:57:18] um and that's where I take big issue and I always have and I think is what you're talking about online where I've always kind of been counterculture in that sense is I've always rejected this idea of me time and I've always spoken out this like

[00:57:30] canceling plans and self-care Sundays and I've always kind of talked shit on those because I feel like people get addicted to that in the sense that they convince themselves they're going to be happy by avoiding all responsibility but truthfully from my own

[00:57:46] experience trust me I lived a lot of years avoiding responsibility and I lived a lifestyle that I think most people would consider the dream I mean when I came out about my my depression I had a lot of men right me thousands of messages

[00:57:58] saying like I thought you were living like the life from the outside looking in I was like this guy's the man and they all wanted to be like me and I can say from experience the best you're ever going to feel is dedicating yourself to something that requires

[00:58:10] you to put in a lot of fucking work whether that's a relationship or a family or a career if you want to be happy you have to suffer because it's just that whole you know you can get into like the

[00:58:24] the hubrim inside of things they talk about like the dope me and all that like you just have to be bored nothing you do like nothing feels as good as working for something and achieving it like you'll never you'll never take a drug you'll never have a spa

[00:58:38] day and you'll never have a me night or your cuddling or blanket that's going to feel half as good as working for something that you busted your ass for and watching it work it just did nothing to ever compare that it's true

[00:58:54] I want to talk about your book William is a weirdo because I think it really nicely ties into everything that we've been talking about but it's a children's book it's my debut children's book which I love because I feel I always think about all the stuff

[00:59:08] that we talk about it's and it's like a lot of us have suffered until we got to the point where we're like holy shit I need perspective or I need to read like someone's autobiography and you know learn about what they've done and the

[00:59:22] mistakes they've made because you know I want to go down the right path that's where you get where you're like okay I'm going to follow this guy and this guy and this girl and you know figure out my life I think that's what happens to people when they

[00:59:34] start looking for answers but it would be nice if we could learn a lot of these things earlier at a young age which is what I love that you have a children's book what is the premise of this book and what are you trying to say with it

[00:59:53] what are you trying to teach I think kind of the theme like you said we talked about this whole thing is our sense of belonging our desire to belong and we see it happen probably now more than ever is people just

[01:00:09] compromise who they are just to belong to something and it starts at a young age I think it starts when you're a kid and you get boldly or picked on and you start changing who you are just because you want your classmates to accept you

[01:00:25] or you want your neighbors to accept you or you want your parents to be happy with you and so the premise of this book is it's about a kid named William he's a weirdo and he doesn't have friends because of it he has a hard time making friends

[01:00:39] but he just does the things that make him happy and in the end of it he realizes he's just happier when he does his own thing he doesn't need people to accept him in order to be happy because he enjoys

[01:00:53] what he does even though other kids might think it's weird and when you think about that when we're kids we don't know we're weird until someone tells us we're weird like if no one ever told you and you just did naturally what you were drawn

[01:01:07] to as a child and you had the hobbies and interests that you wanted to and no one told you that was weird your life would probably be different now than it was because at some point someone's going to tell us we're weird, someone's going to tell us

[01:01:21] we're stupid or someone's going to tell us we're this or that and we're going to change the things we're naturally drawn to to fit in and I want nothing more than for my own son to be his own little weirdo in the sense that

[01:01:34] like if he does things that other kids don't agree with or he does things that are different if he's happy doing it I want him to feel like he can keep doing those and so I've actually tried since writing this book

[01:01:46] you know the tabby word in my language now is weirdo I try not to call people weirdos anymore because when I was writing this book I realized just how often I look at people and go I'm fucking weirdo but they're not, they're just kind of

[01:02:02] being who they are you know I do think there's a lot of fake weird in society right now I think it's pretty easy to identify people that are trying to do things just to get attention you can just look at anyone that's trying to do something outlandish

[01:02:15] I mean stuff I was doing in my 20s trying to do stuff to get people to look at you different just the way certain people dress or certain people act it's just one of those things where you can just tell it's not authentic

[01:02:26] you can sense when someone is just trying to be weird just to get attention, you can sense it it's hard to describe it but we all know when it's happening I think there's a lot of that now with social media but then there's those people that are genuinely

[01:02:41] just different and I look at some of those people and I know in the past I've called those people weirdos and I try not to anymore so that's really what the book is encouraging the power of not fitting in

[01:02:54] and I feel like anyone who's ever done something really successful in their life did so because they didn't fit in my own career is an example of not fitting in and doing things differently and I just want to instill that in myself

[01:03:09] but also a lot of, I think a lot of adults are going to read this book and realize oh shit, I need to stop doing this myself I think it's just as much for the children as it is for the parents who read it to them

[01:03:22] and the cool thing about it is illustrated by my father so my dad and I did this together like I said, I grew up in a very creative household my mom has always encouraged me to read and stuff and I think that's probably why

[01:03:33] that rejection from my mother was so hard for me in my teenage years because growing up my mom was like my best friend because we read all the time together she bought me all the illustrated classics I read Mark Twain I read Count of Money, Cristo

[01:03:47] and I read Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea I read all these classics because of my mom she would buy them for me and encouraged me to read them so we always had that really tight bond we enjoyed reading and storytelling and we enjoyed kind of

[01:04:03] these worlds we could travel to together through books and so when she rejected me in my teenage years I think that's why it hit me so hard because I kind of felt like she turned her back on me and so I had this really good bond

[01:04:17] with my parents growing up my dad was an illustrator so my mom was really into reading my dad's always been an artist his whole life he's always made a living the whole reason I really got into heavy metal music

[01:04:27] and rock is because my dad always had his art studio at home and he would always be working from home and I'd go sit in my dad's art studio and he'd give me a color pencil and some paper and now I draw on my table

[01:04:37] he would work on his for whatever book he was currently working on and he would listen to Led Zeppelin and Van Halen and Pink Floyd and Peter Frampton and my dad was the one who introduced me to Rage Against the Machine and Rob Zombie

[01:04:50] I heard about all those through my dad I remember I was like 10 or 11 and my dad had a white zombie CD and he introduced me to white zombie and smashing pumpkins I'm really thinking like man these bands are fucking sick so I've always had that cool creative connection

[01:05:04] with my parents and so when I wanted to do this book there's no one I wanted to do other than my dad I was like we have to do this book together and so it's cool because he illustrated it and it just feels

[01:05:16] you know whether the books are a success or not I do feel like it's going to do fairly well it's just something that him and I have been able to to create together and we haven't ever done that before like my other books for example

[01:05:26] they have illustrations in them but I didn't have my dad do the illustrations I had like friends of mine do the illustrations these? yeah my friend did all those okay partially because a lot of the illustrations were crass and crude

[01:05:38] and I didn't think my dad would draw them and so I just I've never done a project with my father before I love this your past that's a good story I don't think I've read this one but I like the image of your past you'll dig that one

[01:05:54] on fire okay then I'm just going to it's a story about a woman who became the most powerful female in the empire who started out as a stage actress and within like a matter of years she was the most influential person in the world

[01:06:08] and you can tell I want influence and power absolutely I mean you had Robert Green on so obviously you do yeah so that's that's William that's kind of the idea behind that book I love that and I want to read it and I'm not a child

[01:06:22] well I'm leaving you copies yeah I'm really excited are your parents proud of you? I would imagine so I mean I got a great relationship with them now there's probably things I've said in this podcast today they've never heard me say my dad listens to all my podcasts

[01:06:39] so it'll get relayed to my mom through that most likely hey Christopher Creek yeah exactly my dad will listen to this and I know there's stuff in the book that is going to be hard for them to read

[01:06:52] which is good because it was hard for me to write I think it should be but I would I know they are I mean I know the way they act about it now and the way they talk about it now

[01:07:01] like I've been out to dinner with them before when people have come over and wanted to take a photo with me and my mom will get kind of bashful she's like that just happened yeah it's fun we got a good thing going now

[01:07:12] especially now that I'm a father I see them just really leaning into being grandparents and stuff and it's cool I'm actually trying to move them out to down the street for me hopefully so they can be more involved yeah I know that well I still live in Utah

[01:07:25] I live across the country now oh man I think they've only seen they haven't seen my son in over a year like every time I've tried to get home son has happened they're supposed to come out and visit and then my dad got a full knee replacement

[01:07:38] and then there I was supposed to go see them and my mom broke both her ankles like there's just things just keep happening and so I was like man you guys just gotta live close we gotta move you down the street I think that's the move

[01:07:47] that's the plan I think that's the move what's your take on politics because we talked earlier and you said a lot of your fans will be like well what side are you on I think the two-party system is complete bullshit

[01:08:00] I think the fact that you have to choose one or only two options is wrong and I think the majority of people fall in the middle but they're afraid to admit it I think it goes right back to what we've talked about that sense of belonging

[01:08:15] when you feel like you're in a group and one of your ideas is gonna put you on the outskirts of that group is scary so a lot of people just hide their ideas or they pretend they believe something they don't and I have a hard time believing

[01:08:27] that most people are 100% into either camp I think most people fall in the middle but they're afraid to admit they fall in the middle like they're afraid to admit that they can agree on one issue and disagree on another and so during like 2020 through 2022

[01:08:41] and it was really really embedded into everyone to be tribal against each other is when I had a lot of people commenting saying like I can't tell who your support and why is that it's like cause I don't support either of them I don't support either party

[01:08:56] I agree with issues on both sides because I'm a human and I feel like you should do the same thing so I have chosen the side and the side I've chosen is the side of people I truly believe it's us against them

[01:09:07] like that really is how my mentality is with it I think there's a bunch of elites that are out of touch with the world and out of touch with the everyday person and I think we need to view our communities and our neighbors

[01:09:25] as our allies more than anything it's wild to me how quickly people are willing to step on their neighbors neck and in the next minute they'll turn around and defend a politician who doesn't give a fuck about them Thank you It's hard to say that That's the issue

[01:09:41] I really don't think I truly believe the vast majority of them don't give a fuck about us They don't We really don't And it goes back to what you said Sorry to cut you off I'm just so passionate about this and I know that you talk about this

[01:09:55] it goes back to that whole thing that it's like you're the only person who can save yourself and to rely on politicians or to believe that some president is gonna solve all your problems just because they're out there giving speeches about this shit because they want to win

[01:10:12] It's not gonna happen It's not gonna happen dude And I always think about how passionate people are on Twitter or ex or threads or whatever social media platform you can find and I've had friends that are big big voices in politics who have stepped aside recently

[01:10:32] and they're like I was in a cult literally they'll have someone coming on who's gonna come and drop that bomb here I like that Yeah Very much is it cold It very much is either side Either side I agree That's what I'm saying

[01:10:46] The idea that you have to choose between two sides is asinine I can imagine if you went through your whole life what if your whole life you only had two choices of car two choices of food two choices of who you're gonna date

[01:10:55] if that's all you had your whole life was two choices And you believe those things are gonna save you they're not But now like you're putting some of the most powerful ideologies into just two choices it's like humans and community in particular are so complex

[01:11:13] and there's so many factors at play in everything that kind of happens to us in our daily lives you know when you put you pack 11 million people into a couple square miles like New York for example and you really think you're just gonna create one structure

[01:11:25] it's gonna work for everyone it's just not gonna happen There needs to be middle ground there needs to be a lot more discussion than has happened and I sadly don't see it happening I kind of feel like we're so far down a path something's gonna have to implode

[01:11:42] in order for it to kind of reset itself I just don't know what that implosion is gonna be I think the message that's lost on people is there is no one size fits all and they're trying to make it seem like there is

[01:11:55] Because there's power in doing that It's easy to control when you can be corralled into two different things 100% but what worked for one person may not work for you so my whole thing is if you're a young person and I have an emphasis on younger people

[01:12:10] the same way you do it's easier to teach them as they're growing versus getting adults to unlearn everything it's both worthwhile endeavors completely but when I think about young people or think about how much pain we endured as kids that could have been prevented

[01:12:26] if we just had the right guides or the right information and to take a human being and to be like, look you're either gonna vote for this person or this person and you should pay attention to politics it infuriates me because all of that time

[01:12:41] they spent online fighting with people and you know how much time they're spending in the comments it's out there these people are enraged and they're incentivized to be that way but instead to be like, look there are people out there who can help you in your relationships

[01:12:57] they can help you navigate conflicts they can help you learn about AI they can help you learn about this about that there are so many subject matter experts who devote their lives to things that you could learn about that'll change the trajectory of your life but instead

[01:13:11] you're focusing on politicians and freaking out over who you're gonna vote for the fuck out of here that's how I feel I agree right? I think a lot of people it's like you said they want to belong so badly and also

[01:13:25] like I said earlier we get addicted to weird things so many people are addicted to outrage now because it's just an easy emotion to go to and you can get into like the science of it but your brain rewires itself to the neurons that you frequent most often

[01:13:40] and people that so quickly go to rage are addicted to this kind of behavior like it really becomes something that you have to unwire over time like people are so addicted to these quick responses and they feel validated when other people are angry with them

[01:13:58] it's just, it's odd it's really odd I mean my girlfriend and I talk about this often where we'll just think man I kind of feel like society peaked in like 2013 like 2013 like social media was kind of popular but you still kind of had your privacy

[01:14:14] it was fun, like the jokes online were really good people had a sense of humor and it's kind of seemed like people really like 2016 is when like you saw the sense of humor the collective sense of humor just dive bomb and then by 2020 it was like

[01:14:28] I didn't want to be on social media like I actually don't really want to be on social media much these days anyway I have to actively remind myself to still participate in it because I just so I'm over it I don't like what it's become

[01:14:41] Yeah you don't post that much I used to post every day and now I'm like, I think I've posted 20 times in the last year maybe I have a hard time when to participate in it because I do feel like it is so detrimental and taken from someone who's

[01:14:58] my essentially, my whole career is built on social media it's been very beneficial to me and I'm grateful to have had it when I did because I don't know that I would have found as large of a voice for my writing as quickly

[01:15:10] as I did I think eventually I might have got there but it might have been like a 20 year journey I'm a lot happier when I'm not involved in social media I kind of hate when I have to, I was like, ah fuck

[01:15:22] I got a book release coming up and I'll be like I gotta start participating again I gotta promote things and I just I don't like it is the response from social media not I mean of course everyone has their critics but do you find that

[01:15:36] your, the response from your audience, fans whatever you want to call them isn't mostly positive 50-50 it depends because you refer to yourself as controversial to me I don't see you that way because I read your stuff and I'm just like I agree I don't know

[01:15:56] I feel I totally relate to the you writing to you I think most creativity should be controversial I think it should appeal to everyone I think when you're trying to like one size fits all like you said earlier with your work it's you usually water

[01:16:12] down and so the fact that you identify so strongly with it just kind of reaffirms the fact that I am being authentic with it because there's people on the other side of it that hate it just as much as you like it I've lost a lot of followers

[01:16:30] this year I think probably this year is probably on the first years I've watched my follower just constantly drop I saw you liked a post by I think the account is inspired to write I know the post you're talking about I actually caught it on that

[01:16:44] I loved it where she talks about how she talks about how she lost 20,000 followers and she's like here's why that's a good thing she went on and on about that it's so true your art your creativity your expression it's not meant to be consumed by everybody

[01:17:00] it's funny because in the original days of Twitter when I first started using Instagram I used to tell my buddies this I can tell I wrote something good because I lose more people than I gain and that was 2013 is like really how I based my work

[01:17:16] I was like if 100 people and follow me at the time I had a couple thousand followers 100 people and follow me this is a good post and I used to try and lose followers every time and then it kind of got to the point where

[01:17:26] she gets addicted to watching the notch take higher and higher and then I would lose a bunch of followers and I was like what the fuck and I had to remind myself that that's kind of what I was trying to do from the get go

[01:17:38] and this past year I probably lost 20,000, 30,000 easy I haven't really looked at the number but I know I've lost a lot because I'll occasionally go check I used to have a lot more last month I think it could be because I'm not as active

[01:17:54] but also I think a lot of people just they grow out of things and that's fine I think certain people might not resonate with my stuff like they used to, they might be at a different phase in their life where they don't feel like they need it

[01:18:04] or they just disagree with me now and I know I lost a lot of people during the COVID years because of my political views I was telling people to question the media, I was telling people to not trust the politicians I was telling people to think for themselves

[01:18:20] I was telling people to not turn on their neighbors and I was telling people like you know I said like you can do whatever you want to do in life but just keep in mind like if we lose the ability to choose, like we're all going to lose

[01:18:30] there should still be a choice about this stuff and people would go off on me, they'd be so mad I would lose huge chunks of followers sometimes I took a road trip across the country I drove from from Vegas to Miami

[01:18:46] and I drove all along the south and I stopped in New Orleans and I stopped in like couple places in Texas and Tallahassee and I stopped in these little areas and it was during the height of like the coming out of the lockdowns and so everything was still

[01:19:02] kind of like ghost towny and I remember just talking with people and it just kind of reaffirmed or I'd say it re-ignited my faith in humanity because during that time it was like when everyone's just kind of against each other and I would just go to restaurants

[01:19:20] and they'd be like empty but I'd have a really good conversation with my server or I'd talk with like the hotel attendant that checked me out and I'd have really good conversations with them and I wrote a post about it and I posted like

[01:19:32] I showed the map that I just drove and I said hey I just stopped in all these cities and I just want you guys to know like America is more united than they're making it out to be right now in the news like I just spent 10 days

[01:19:44] driving across the country and even though right now it seems like everything's hell and it's you know falling apart like I just want to let you know like people are good out there like if you go out there and talk with people they're still good

[01:19:56] and people were pissed at that message like I had people going off on me saying stuff like oh you only had that experience because you're a tall white man or like you only had that experience because you know who you are you only had that experience because

[01:20:14] of this they're just they were trying to find reasons to believe that America was worse than it was and that was when I was like whoa this is a fucking problem like people are looking for reasons to hate each other now and it blew my mind

[01:20:30] the stuff that was considered controversial during that time period yeah and then people wonder why we have really high rates of loneliness and depression yeah mental health right now is terrible I mean I wrote something last week I think it was

[01:20:44] I wrote something saying you know with everyone being pushed towards like fake everything like you know you got like all these fake processed foods you got like these fake meats you got like artificial intelligence being used as creativity and you got these fake digital connections

[01:20:56] and you got people marrying like AI girlfriends and like all this and I wrote something like the more we're pushed towards fake these here it is for us to break and you know just so you know like if you're worried about your mental health you can't replace

[01:21:12] these things like you need genuine connection you need real creativity you need to be eating like good food and people were pissed I lost a lot of followers last week just off that post because people are like oh well you're just

[01:21:26] they thought I was like demonizing like veganism or vegetarian diets because I specifically said fake meat and I was like go to the grocery store and I was like this fake meat or oat milk that's 47 ingredients in it look at how many of those ingredients have

[01:21:42] been proven to cause like neurological disorders or their carcinogens and tell me those aren't affecting people negatively or look at someone who has an AI girlfriend who spends their whole life gaming and sitting behind a computer watching porn and tell me they don't have mental health issues

[01:22:00] you know all this fake stuff that's being driven towards or you know look at art created by you know chat, GPT or the fuck it's called I can't stand AI in the use of creativity I think you can look at it and it just lacks soul

[01:22:14] and it's like so easy to look at it and be like this just doesn't feel right you can't tell me that you can go through go through like a cathedral in Paris for example and look at the portraits that were painted there

[01:22:30] and look at the artwork that was put into sculpting every little sconce and light fixture in there and tell me that isn't more inspirational than a piece of art created by AI and this is what I was trying to tell people I was like the real thing

[01:22:44] is always going to be better for you and it's what humans need I'm really into architecture I always have been and there's accounts I follow now that kind of talk about how this whole drive towards like modern like straight angles and stuff and just like really sleek design

[01:23:02] how much it has an effect on your mental health versus if you live somewhere where you can walk around see like dome structures and original cathedrals and gothic you know architecture and just the unique shapes how much better it is for your brain

[01:23:16] and I like seeing people take a stance on that because it's funny even when I lived in New York I was referred to my apartment as human storage because it felt like this scene in the matrix where Neil wakes up and he's in the pod

[01:23:28] and he looks out and sees them all over because I lived in a sky rise in Manhattan I had like 50 floors or something and I remember just looking out at the other buildings and every time I did that I just thought of that scene in the matrix

[01:23:40] and I'm here thinking I can't live in New York forever like it was great at the time it was fun, it was good for my career but just the idea of that being your life I just think it lends itself towards depression I really do I believe that

[01:24:00] there's a lot of people who say New York is the loneliest city in the world and there's like people coming out talking I have friends that will tell me they've never felt as lonely as they did when they moved to New York City

[01:24:10] and they moved to New York City thinking it was going to be the exact opposite because you're so surrounded but there's something about feeling isolated among 11 million people whatever the population is that just makes you feel like but we could talk about all sorts of different things

[01:24:26] the point is all this fake crap that people are being driven towards and they're replacing the real in their lives with it I just I don't see it being sustainable and I hope we see more people take a stance or take a step back

[01:24:42] and try to appreciate the real things I mean the hotel I'm staying at here in LA we ordered some towels to our room and we sent them up comes up in a robot you open the door and the robot beeps at you you push a button

[01:24:58] it hands you the towels and asks how your stay is if you say your stay's good it makes a cheery noise you didn't tip the robot did you no hell no but my girlfriend and I had the same reaction to it we're just like this is fucked up

[01:25:14] and it was funny because then we saw a guy in the elevator and he's like did you see that robot we just ordered towels and that's how they sent it and he's like that's someone's job that's not right

[01:25:24] and I told him honestly if I was the hotel staff I wouldn't be supporting that robot because they are trying to replace you with those things but there's just something about and then I ordered a coffee and they sent coffee up in the robot

[01:25:36] they put it in the little it has a little shelf that holds things and you can't tell me that's a better experience than having an individual hand you a towel and ask how your stay is or have someone come up and hand you a coffee

[01:25:50] and you think a person for it I think as a kid there's probably the little novelty element where you're just like oh cool it's a robot but if that's the future we're going towards like fuck man I don't want to order coffee from a robot

[01:26:06] I can't even process what you just told me this is right here in LA there's several hotels now that have these robots I didn't know that that was happening but I'll send you a link to them

[01:26:16] I've seen them before I've just never stayed in a hotel that had them okay I've seen little things on the streets that deliver food I've heard about those those I've seen but not room service they're like butler robots the hotels are using

[01:26:30] and they're using it to replace a job that's why you can't tell me they're using it for any other reason no that's insane to me yeah and it's just weird it's just beeps and like you know it's recording you

[01:26:40] there's no way I think doesn't have a camera on it so it's probably recording your interaction with it and it's just odd when you think about it oh that's so uncomfortable it is very weird it makes you not want to order anything

[01:26:50] I won't stay at the hotel again I won't tell you what the name of the hotel is I don't want to bash them but I won't stay there again because of that it just feels it feels it's just too odd yeah well when we put this out

[01:27:02] I'm sure people will get the message I'm sure you get a lot of messages like asking for advice and stuff that's just like the nature part of the course yeah it's part of the course what do you feel like what do you feel like people are most

[01:27:22] concerned about or what do you what kind of messages are you getting mostly is it like men who feel lonely or women who want relationship advice what do you see a lot of it's changed as my work has changed years ago I used to mostly get relationship stuff

[01:27:40] because I was single and dating at the time so a lot of I wrote about relationship stuff a lot now I primarily get mental health stuff because I was very open about my own mental health struggle and so I get a lot of people asking me

[01:27:56] how they can get through it and I'd say the other side of it now is a lot of people asking how they can have hard conversations like people are always asking me how can I tell my significant other I disagree with them politically

[01:28:13] or how can I have this conversation with my mom because they'll fill me in on like this paragraph long conversation that happened at dinner and be like how do I express myself and let her know that's not what I want for my life I'd say that's probably the

[01:28:29] large portion of it now is people I think a lot of it is people need they're looking for reassurance they're almost looking for like they're unsure if what they feel is right and they kind of need me to validate them and be like it's okay

[01:28:45] to have that conversation and I think it's largely because the past couple years everyone's felt very suppressed people have been very scared to share opinions for being labeled something you're not sure about for being labeled something or not or being you know canceled and so I think probably

[01:29:07] the worst issue right now that we're dealing with in society is people not being themselves because they're afraid to be that's kind of why I feel the William is a weirdo book is so important I mean obviously it's not about you know having arguments

[01:29:21] or stuff like that but I think people have lost the ability to be themselves they're so fucking scared of being labeled something they're so scared of being ganged up on and people just don't have genuine conversations and I said this on another podcast one time

[01:29:37] probably the biggest recipe for depression is self suppression like when you hide who you are which is essentially what I was doing for many years I was you know portraying a character at times and whether you're hiding who you are

[01:29:49] through your actions or you're hiding who you are by not expressing your true opinions or feelings to people or you're really depressed more than anything because your whole life is a fucking lie and any success you do achieve you're gonna question because you know you're being fake

[01:30:05] I know a lot of people talk about imposter syndrome and I know it's a very real thing but I think a lot of people bring imposter syndrome on themselves because they're fake and they know they're being fake and so they get a bunch of attention for it

[01:30:17] and they question that attention because they rightfully should because they got it being something they're not um and I remember what your question is but I think that's probably the biggest issue is people just being afraid to be who they are yeah I mean I was just asking

[01:30:31] what questions you get a lot or what types of, you know what type of so yeah I get a lot of people asking for help expressing their opinions and stuff yeah I mean I completely relate to that and I've also been cancelled which was its own experience

[01:30:47] you have to choose to be cancelled yeah that's true you literally have to allow it yeah yeah like yeah I think in certain arenas like Hollywood I think certain people have gotten cancelled only in the sense that like yeah they either go to jail or they choose

[01:31:07] not to express themselves anymore because the tribe doesn't but I think you're right if you do there's always a place that you can voice your opinion and express things and be yourself I mean you even see like actual criminals have shows made about them

[01:31:27] and like they're able to you have criminals that get out of jail and have like modeling careers and shit now there's people who do like really horrible things that still have careers about it because they never gave up on themselves yeah

[01:31:39] and that's how you get cancelled for the most part is you give up on yourself I mean I wrote about in speech therapy like one of the subjects in there is how to deal with being cancelled what was your advice I think if you genuinely feel

[01:31:51] sorry about it you should apologize but only if you actually regret what you did don't be pressured into it yeah if you don't feel sorry for it don't apologize because that's fake again you're being fake you should only apologize if you actually really are remorseful

[01:32:07] and you should dress it once and if you don't feel sorry about it don't say anything just keep fucking doing your thing don't even address it don't even acknowledge the fact that people are trying to cancel you

[01:32:19] don't acknowledge the fact that people are upset just keep doing your thing and guess what in 72 hours people are going to be on to something else that's the best advice and I wish that I talked to you before one of my sponsors called me and told me

[01:32:31] I needed to make an apology because I wasn't sorry and then I got memed after I apologized are you okay talking about it? yeah 100% this is actually the first time I'm talking about it publicly so I became big as an NFT personality in the crypto space

[01:32:47] I was on clubhouse there was a bunch of NFT rooms I was mingling with artists I had a friend moved to Twitter as clubhouse was dying down he was doing tons of NFT it's like NFC like board ape kind of stuff okay but there was

[01:33:05] I don't know if you remember there was a ton of money from venture capital going into these I remember businesses and I had a really good reputation to be honest I still do I'll tell you what happened here I associated with a lot of relevant people

[01:33:27] I was known as an interviewer I have a pretty conservative appeal I'm not like posting bikini photos all the time or anything so it was very easy for me to get brand deals it was very male dominated so I stood out and I was making

[01:33:43] money left and right so you mean like brand deals like you'd promote certain NFT collections yeah like I would host rooms for collections I would interview someone was going to drop an NFT collection you'd be the host of the event

[01:33:59] they'd come to me and be like hey could you interview us and I was always really really careful about telling them look I can't promote it I can't ask you questions that lead you into the talking point

[01:34:09] but I'm not going to be like oh this is the best drop ever yeah absolutely and so I was always careful about that then I started getting brand deals from these bigger companies I got this started out this podcast started with a sponsorship

[01:34:25] from a really big crypto company which I told them right away I'm like this podcast and thank god it's not going to be a crypto podcast but they're like I'm going to be a crypto and they're like yeah that's fine because they want to reach the masses

[01:34:41] anyway otherwise we're all in the same community and everyone knows about that company so what happened was I'm friends with the founder of Dogecoin Billy Marcus and he basically sold his Doge before Elon pumped it I guess could have been a billionaire and didn't make all the money

[01:35:05] he has a job he does well but he had an NFT collection that he didn't release and I'm like oh my god just release it let's make money and he's like no I don't really want to people got so mad about the Dogecoin thing

[01:35:21] I don't want to charge people was it a Doge NFT collection? yeah it was called Blocky Doge and he had released other ones and they did relatively well this was called Blocky Doge 3 and I was like okay well let's just release it as a free mint

[01:35:35] what does that mean? it means it's free to mint but the floor price will start escalating as demand goes up for the project and there's more hype and so basically I was helping him promote it arranging the room stuff like that and basically what happened

[01:35:59] I'm trying to think of like where where it started to go wrong and what ended up happening so so I was talking about that NFT project in some of the twitter spaces and there was one in particular that a couple of my friends hosted and

[01:36:23] I had asked them if they wanted to talk to him because frankly a lot of people wanted to talk to the founder of Dogecoin and I'm like okay let me give this one to my friends and he wasn't even trying to talk about the project for a majority

[01:36:39] of the time he just talked about it a little bit at the end and my payment for helping since it was a free mint was around 200 NFTs so I was receiving 200 NFTs for helping and here's what happened I was in New York for something called NFT NYC and

[01:37:03] I didn't want to even deal with this like I didn't want the NFT sent to me I wanted I was being honored at this thing called the NFT 100 which was the top influencers in NFTs I just wanted to mingle with my friends and go to all the events

[01:37:19] so I met up someone who worked with me and I said hey can I have these NFTs sent to your wallet and then I sent them I don't know if you know these terms but gas I don't know loosely what these are yeah so I sent them Ethereum

[01:37:45] from my doxxed wallet I wasn't trying to hide anything Ethereum for gas money for the transactions so I just told them hey if the price goes up you can sell them in bundles because what was I going to do with 200 NFTs like just keep them

[01:38:05] that was my payment for it what does anyone do with an NFT yeah that's another story but anyway what happened was I had told them to sell in bundles but not thinking that this person would sell chunks of them or all of them gave very vague instructions

[01:38:27] they ended up selling I think all 200 and then people started taking recordings of twitter spaces that I did and then there was this story that came up on on twitter that I pumped and dumped so you didn't get a rugpull yes that's what they thought I was doing

[01:38:47] and and I was like oh my god that's not what I was trying to do at all and one of my sponsors called me and said hey people are reaching out to us what are you going to do it was a crypto sponsor and I'm like okay

[01:39:07] I'm going to put all the money back in the collection because of course they're mad that I have money off of this I'm going to give all the money back it was like 40,000 but then there were also people that claimed they bought so many

[01:39:23] that were messaging me and I even sent money to them thousands of dollars and these transactions are available for anyone to see and I was like I'm just going to do that and it's not like I was doing it

[01:39:37] for these people I was doing it for my own conscience because there was a point where I'm like wait I'm not that person and so put all the money back in the project and the sponsor goes you should make a statement

[01:39:51] and here's where I wish I took your advice these people do not give a shit they're out there with their pitchforks they don't care what you say they don't give a shit about you and so I wrote this thing one of the sentences

[01:40:05] because I didn't know how to be like okay it was my fault but it wasn't I wrote mistakes were made in a wallet I control which became a meme like if you see that anywhere that's all me, that's my sentence it's a meme people use it

[01:40:21] all the time I got memed tons of people started dog piling on me there was a guy who goes by the name of Zach XBT who wrote who made a post and like he's the guy that like uncovers scams he calls himself an on chain sleuth

[01:40:41] and he made a post about me pump and dumping then there were there were articles in crypto in crypto outlets that came out about me Nicole Benham pumps and dumps media personality blah blah blah and it turned my life around for two weeks I was just like

[01:41:05] I can't be alive anymore it felt like the whole world was against me and it made things very clear for me first of all I saw which friends backed away from me because that had happened and which ones came to my side and they're like

[01:41:19] look you're a good person whatever happened let's just move through it together it really puts things in perspective when you're down bad and having the right support system changes everything and what I noticed was the people who reached out a lot of them were

[01:41:39] wealthy or famous in some arena and they're like hey this has happened to me I was just gonna that was my next question is I was gonna say the people that reached out to you are probably ones who had experienced it yes and that's what happens

[01:41:51] the bigger you get now there's a microscope on you and that offered so much perspective one guy was like I used to work at Facebook and I was doing stuff with people's data nothing illegal but just you know people had found out

[01:42:13] and here's how I got it wiped off the internet if you want to call this guy he'll get all this wiped off the internet and I started talking to other people and they had other resources and then one guy goes you know Nicole this guy

[01:42:29] is associated with Elon Musk he's literally always in communication with Elon Elon has articles about him pumping and dumping pumping and dumping Gary Vaynerchuk has articles about him pumping and dumping and started naming all of these people that have been accused of doing the same thing

[01:42:49] who are extremely well liked in society of course there are people who have actually rug pulled whose intention was to do that but that's not everybody so you should just keep the article up it kind of makes you look like a boss yeah

[01:43:09] when you hide it it just shows that you're embarrassed or that you actually don't want it out there I did delete the apology tweet because it was so inauthentic I genuinely was sorry if anybody did lose money but I know who I am and there's no

[01:43:25] the type of person that was trying to rug pull people I would have kept that money and I didn't totally I didn't and the internet turned on me I saw some people that I thought were my good friends turn on me

[01:43:39] there were months that I felt like very alone and then this podcast started doing really well in getting traction and then a lot of those people just came out of the woodwork and they're now trying to be a guest trying to come on the podcast

[01:43:53] and then it just works that's how shit works and I can definitely and here's the other thing my identity was so wrapped up in being this like NFT personality and everyone's like Nicole you're not that you're not a degenerate you don't spend your time gambling

[01:44:13] buying NFTs of course I have some NFTs and some you know some of the communities and founders that I like but that's not who you are I'm just I like sitting here talking with people like you you know if it

[01:44:25] happens to be an NFT founder who built something really cool I'll talk to them but for the most part that ain't me and this is why I was gonna go ahead yeah so so it completely brought me back to myself and it really helped me gain

[01:44:39] perspective about who I am and what I want to do and who I want to surround myself with this is why you have to have yourself to fall back on that's why that's why I'm so wary of people having to belong to things so desperately

[01:44:53] because at some point you're something's gonna happen something's gonna happen you have to rely on yourself oh and that you know they were they used the word community religiously you know the NFT world it's not a community these people turn

[01:45:05] on each other all the time their engagement farming all the time they're just it's the wildest thing I've ever seen and I don't recommend it to a lot of people I think the technology is really cool but I think the way that people engage is frankly

[01:45:19] just not healthy last question are you ready yes okay so it's hard for a lot of people especially someone like you you have a lot of messages you want to share you shared many today to decide what message is the most important

[01:45:37] that you feel like most urgently needs to be shared in this day and age or today and so I came up with this scenario so you're at the Oscars and you're not like it already you like it already you're nominated for let's say a documentary about

[01:45:55] getting better being weird getting better good scenario about being yourself and being weird and embracing that and they announce all the nominees finally they call winner and it's you sounds about right score and so you walk up to the stage you think everybody you need to think

[01:46:15] your parents your girlfriend wife whatever wherever your partner girlfriend yeah your son and when you're done thinking everybody there's about 45 seconds to a minute window where you can say whatever you want there's going to be headlines it will be viral on tiktok reels X threads platform

[01:46:43] and it's going to be shared everywhere what are you going to say in that 45 seconds I would tell people that in life I think you need to seek to become what you fear and I think what I mean by that is what you fear the most

[01:47:06] is often what you need to lean into because there's a reason why you feel so afraid of a certain scenario and when you try to become whatever it is you're afraid of you're probably going to find out that it's not as bad as it is and honestly

[01:47:22] it's what you actually want and I think my life's a perfect example that everything I feared becoming I eventually became and my life's better now because of it I was afraid of becoming vulnerable I was afraid of becoming a father

[01:47:36] I was afraid of becoming someone who had real responsibility I was afraid of becoming you know a writer who was who has taken in a different light than other and just being like a comedy writer I was kind of afraid of having that connotation

[01:47:50] and I realized all the reasons why I was afraid of it and then now that I'm there it's better than my life would have been if you continue to resist your fear your whole life you're just limiting your potential there's a reason you feel that fear

[01:48:06] and you have to lean into it and it's not going to take you away from the coffin you know direct you where you need to go or it'll just bury you alive that's so true I'm going to lean into my fears I'm super inspired

[01:48:20] by everything this conversation that we have I feel like I'm going to go listen to this podcast again but thank you for coming on and I think everybody should buy all your books thanks for having me