Have you ever felt like you just don’t have what it takes to be healthy, vibrant and living a life of meaning? Like you missed the boat, and it’s just too late for you? Today’s guest is a powerful invitation and reminder that healing and sovereignty are always just one choice, one inflection point, away.
Thomas P. Seager, PhD is an Associate Professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering & the Built Environment at Arizona State University in Tempe AZ. His teaching and research is focused on a new approach to personal development called Self-Actual Engineering, which is about redesigning ourselves, our relationships, and our lives to realise more of our fullest potential. He is also the CEO of Morozko forge, an ice bath cold plunge I would LOVE to get my body into!
I honour his courage in sharing his vulnerability and authenticity with us and am grateful to have had this change to chat.
Enjoy!
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Timestamps:
04:40 How Thomas P Seager went from being obese for much of his life to a healthy mid 50’s man with high testosterone
05:54 On the madness of diet for a small planet and the lies of modern nutrition
09:48 What it means to be a good husband
14:44 The turning point for Thomas and why his wife didn’t believe him
17:36 The 10000 foot tow-rope
19:22: The fat daddy workout and letting go of pride
20:42 Accidentally attending a ballet class (and then going back for a year)
22:05 ‘The great food diet’
24:31 On the mistake of making ultimatums
27:02 His prostate health scare and how he healed it
29:48 The beginning of the Morozko Forge Ice Baths
30:48 Treating prostate issues with keto and ice baths at 52 years old
31:25 The unexpected high testosterone surprise and how he did it!
38:43 What is Self Actual Engineering?
40:56 The ideal psychological paradigm for creating factory workers…
45:56 What inspires us to give up belonging, comfort and pleasure?
48:08 Why full autonomy might not always be the thing you need
49:22 On realising that he’s an asshole
51:31 On supporting people where they are in their journey
54:22 The only way to work at the top of the hierarchy of needs
55:34 What prevents us from being free
56:31 How unresolved trauma controls the present and what to do about it
58:05 How to heal trauma from a position of control
58:30 On having a do-over
59:59 Don’t judge yourself for the traumas you carry from your childhood
01:01:02 Inherited ancestral trauma
01:03:48 The story you tell yourself is more important than what happened
Links to Thomas P Seager and his work:
- Thomas Seager’s Blog: https://seagertp.substack.com/
- Morozko Forge – The cold plunge ice bath https://www.morozkoforge.com/
- Thomas on IG https://www.instagram.com/seagertp/
- Morozko forge on IG https://www.instagram.com/morozkoforge/
Links to books and things mentioned in the episode:
- Diet for a small planet (bad book)
- No more mr nice guy – Robert A Glover (book)
- Self Actual Engineering
- Maslow’s hierarchy of Needs
- Viktor Frankl – Man’s search for meaning
- Maslow on management
- Change your brain, change your life
- Unspoken voice: How the body releases trauma and restores goodness
- The Body keeps the score
- Complex PTSD – Pete Walker
- It didn’t start with you – Mark Wolynn
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Transcript
Welcome to we are already free, a podcast helping down to earth
Speaker:seekers and free people to live their truth and be the change,
Speaker:rather than spending too much time fighting against what they don't
Speaker:want. Have you ever felt like you just
Speaker:don't have what it takes to be a healthy, vibrant human living a
Speaker:life of meaning? Like maybe you missed the boat or
Speaker:it's just too late for you? Today's guest is a powerful
Speaker:invitation and reminder that healing and sovereignty are always
Speaker:just a choice, an inflection point, a decision away.
Speaker:Thomas P Seeger, a pH.
Speaker:D, is an associate professor in
Speaker:the School of Sustainable Engineering and the built
Speaker:environment at. Arizona State University in Tempe,
Speaker:arizona. His teaching and research is
Speaker:focused on a new approach to personal development called self
Speaker:actual engineering, which is about redesigning ourselves over
Speaker:relationships and our lives to realize more of our fullest
Speaker:potential. He's the CEO of Morozko Forge, an
Speaker:ice bath cold plunge I would really love to get my hands on and
Speaker:my body into.
Speaker:I discovered him first of all when
Speaker:I was researching around health and testosterone and exercise and
Speaker:how to combine ice baths and exercise, and he goes into that.
Speaker:In this episode, Thomas shares the story of how he went from being
Speaker:obese and lost in his middle age to taking responsibility for his
Speaker:health, his life, and his choices.
Speaker:He tells a funny and touching
Speaker:story of how he accidentally ended up in a ballet class, which he
Speaker:then went on to attend for over a year near the end of this.
Speaker:Episode Thomas shares a heartbreaking story of the
Speaker:horrific impact of generational trauma and also how we can start
Speaker:to heal this terrible kind of epidemic, real problem in the
Speaker:world today, something that affects all of us and what we can
Speaker:do about it.
Speaker:Because it's like, how do we
Speaker:navigate when we've had trauma that comes to us through our
Speaker:parents? And it's not even something we
Speaker:directly experience or our grandparents or their parents, and
Speaker:Thomas comes and talks about this.
Speaker:At the end, I really honor his
Speaker:courage in sharing his vulnerability and authenticity
Speaker:with us, and I'm really deeply grateful to have had this chance
Speaker:to chat with him.
Speaker:And I also just what do you want
Speaker:to honor that towards the end it gets very emotional.
Speaker:Thomas shares something that is clearly deeply meaningful for him.
Speaker:And I just want to hold space and ask that you hold space for it,
Speaker:and also to know that you may be in tears by the end of this.
Speaker:So if you're driving or something, just to take some deep breaths,
Speaker:pull over, have a good cry and carry on your way.
Speaker:So there are links to Thomas's Work and the books and everything
Speaker:else that we discuss in the show notes.
Speaker:So you can just go to already free dot me forward slash 007 So that's
Speaker:just all ready free me forward slash 007 for the episode links to
Speaker:all the different platforms wherever you listen and also you
Speaker:just check the actual show notes where you are listening now.
Speaker:And thanks again to all of you who are sharing to anyone who's
Speaker:sharing, subscribing, leaving reviews.
Speaker:It's making a big difference and.
Speaker:Is a beautiful one from frogs.
Speaker:Been had great username loving your podcast so uplifting in these
Speaker:heavy times.
Speaker:I look forward to each Thursday
Speaker:now. I also look forward to each
Speaker:Thursday, so thank you so much for listening, thank you for leaving a
Speaker:review. And finally, I'll stick around to
Speaker:the end to hear some next steps that I'll share to support you on
Speaker:your path if this episode resonates with you.
Speaker:Just want to give you some options always that you could move forward
Speaker:with whatever we discussed in this episode.
Speaker:So now may you find what you seek in this episode with the wonderful
Speaker:Thomas P Seeger.
Speaker:I I'm so interested in your story.
Speaker:I've been following you for a while.
Speaker:Your newsletters I find particularly just so interesting
Speaker:and so valuable.
Speaker:Your story around testosterone and
Speaker:ice bars and exercise like that blew my mind.
Speaker:And so there's multiple directions we could take this in.
Speaker:But I think the first thing I'd really love to cover is I
Speaker:actually, I'm sure that I read somewhere, and you can correct me
Speaker:if I'm wrong, but that at some point you were obese and.
Speaker:To me, like, when I read that, I was like this dude, how's that?
Speaker:You look so healthy.
Speaker:And I'm just wondering, like, what
Speaker:was that trajectory? What happened for you?
Speaker:And yeah, just if we could get that little introduction.
Speaker:Some of the things that come up for me are childhood.
Speaker:I was always a fat kid.
Speaker:At least my memory is always being
Speaker:a fat kid.
Speaker:But sometimes when I look back at
Speaker:the pictures of me, you know, when I'm six or seven, I wasn't fat at
Speaker:that age. I got fat when at an age when I
Speaker:became more aware of myself.
Speaker:In the United States it would be
Speaker:middle school. So this is a 6-7-8 grade, let's
Speaker:say 12 or 13 years old.
Speaker:And I do think that children, we
Speaker:go through different developmental stages at which in those early
Speaker:teenage years, maybe preteen or early teen, we're very
Speaker:self-conscious Peer relationships mean everything to us and we're
Speaker:just beginning to get a sense of identity.
Speaker:But I remember being in first grade.
Speaker:And realizing that I was so that, you know, for me that was six or
Speaker:five or something, realizing that I was fatter than the other boys
Speaker:were. And I also now that I've learned a
Speaker:lot more about nutrition and I've learned a lot more about health, I
Speaker:realized what happened when my mother read diet for a small
Speaker:planet. Are you familiar with this book?
Speaker:I've never heard of it.
Speaker:Well, unfortunately, my parents
Speaker:met in Graduate School at Harvard University.
Speaker:I'm a university professor.
Speaker:My parents were highly educated,
Speaker:and Harvard is one of these liberal institutions.
Speaker:This goes back decades.
Speaker:Harvard was the center of a lot of
Speaker:the I can't even call it science.
Speaker:A lot of the work that was being
Speaker:done in nutrition in the Fifties, sixties and seventies they gave
Speaker:us. These serious misconceptions that
Speaker:now look like big food propaganda.
Speaker:My mother believed that margarine
Speaker:was healthier than butter.
Speaker:What a tragic right.
Speaker:My mother thought that she.
Speaker:I remember her telling me she was
Speaker:scolding me because my best friend in first grade, he was very fast
Speaker:and he was very thin and he used to eat eggs.
Speaker:He his mother taught him how to cook.
Speaker:We had a sleepover.
Speaker:We're cooking eggs.
Speaker:And my mother said, well, he.
Speaker:Can eat eggs, but you can't
Speaker:because you're there's too much cholesterol, they're too fat,
Speaker:you're already too fat.
Speaker:She fed me Lucky Charms.
Speaker:She fed me the breakfast cereals that were, you know, advertised on
Speaker:the Saturday morning cartoons.
Speaker:And, of course, what kid doesn't
Speaker:want marshmallows for breakfast? And my mother thought that because
Speaker:they sprayed vitamins on these things that they must be more
Speaker:nutritious than eggs and bacon and beef and things that are good for
Speaker:you. So I grew up with my mother's sort
Speaker:of ideology that came out of this liberal.
Speaker:You know, now we would call it progressive or woke, but came out
Speaker:of what I'm calling the food propaganda machine that was
Speaker:centered around Harvard and other prestigious universities who had
Speaker:been hired to promote industrial foods instead of natural foods.
Speaker:And my metabolism was this messed up combination of margarine and
Speaker:marshmallows. What did I know?
Speaker:And I went away to school, engineering school.
Speaker:I was very young at the time.
Speaker:This was 17 was a freshman in
Speaker:school. I hadn't even finished growing
Speaker:yet. And I remember this because I, you
Speaker:know, met my friends on my dorm floor.
Speaker:And by the end of the year, I was an inch taller than these guys,
Speaker:that I was the same height at the beginning of the year.
Speaker:I didn't care much for the lectures.
Speaker:We spent most of physics class in the racquetball court, you know,
Speaker:because it was easy to get a court.
Speaker:When everybody else was in physics, I guess, and this is the
Speaker:irony, most people go to college and they complain about the dorm
Speaker:food. But now I was free from, you know,
Speaker:my family's ideas about what I was supposed to be eating.
Speaker:And I was.
Speaker:I still ate some breakfast cereal,
Speaker:but it wasn't Lucky Charms, and I could have all the eggs I wanted.
Speaker:And I was getting a lot of exercise.
Speaker:I really leaned out.
Speaker:Now, part of that is that's the
Speaker:age that I was.
Speaker:But I had talked about free it was
Speaker:all I could eat.
Speaker:There was no food scarcity
Speaker:anymore, and I had to make a lot of adjustments.
Speaker:About my relationship with food, I was fortunate that I leaned out
Speaker:quite a bit.
Speaker:Now I have 3 degrees cause you
Speaker:gotta do that to become a university professor.
Speaker:So I didn't undergraduate and I moved away and then I went back
Speaker:for Graduate School that I moved away.
Speaker:And then I went back for my PhD and I started my PhD kind of late.
Speaker:I was 29 and by that time I was married.
Speaker:I had two kids.
Speaker:But in the twenties you if you're
Speaker:smart, you're very conscious about where are you in them dating
Speaker:marketplace, you know, and at an engineering school where 3.
Speaker:Quarters of the students are men.
Speaker:This was a competitive
Speaker:environment. I stayed in fairly good shape.
Speaker:I was never thin, but I was playing a lot of sports with my
Speaker:friends and enjoying that.
Speaker:But by the time I went back now
Speaker:I'm a family man and I had an idea of what it meant to be a good
Speaker:husband and a good father.
Speaker:And I did not realize this until
Speaker:much later. That I got fat again.
Speaker:I topped out at about 249 and I'm barely 6 feet tall.
Speaker:It's not healthy.
Speaker:But one of the things that
Speaker:happened to me was as a teacher and being on a college campus.
Speaker:And, you know, I'm surrounded by lots of young people.
Speaker:And I thought in my head that one of the ways, I don't think it was
Speaker:just laziness on my part, but one of the ways to be faithful, to be
Speaker:a good husband and a good father, was to somehow make myself
Speaker:unattractive. Now, I don't know exactly what was
Speaker:going on in my head, but it simplified my life to get fat and
Speaker:ugly. It turned out to also be.
Speaker:But ripping off my wife like, on the one hand, I removed myself
Speaker:from any kind of.
Speaker:Sexual flirtation, interaction
Speaker:with any other women.
Speaker:And on the one hand, even though
Speaker:when I went back to school I was old for a PhD student, I was
Speaker:teaching and I was young for a faculty member, you know, 30.
Speaker:I just didn't have to.
Speaker:I was teaching.
Speaker:In engineering.
Speaker:There aren't a lot of women
Speaker:students, but in my own self-conscious brain I simplified
Speaker:lots of things by being a fat dad.
Speaker:Well then.
Speaker:I got to be, you know, my kids got up to high school age, so you
Speaker:gotta Fast forward 10 or 15 years later.
Speaker:And my wife, we're now living in Arizona, we're living in Phoenix,
Speaker:I'm teaching in Tempe at Arizona State.
Speaker:And my wife said she wasn't happy and she wanted to go back to New
Speaker:York and she wanted to take the kids.
Speaker:And you know, our marriage, this had happened before and it each
Speaker:interval, it's sort of an inflection point at which I could
Speaker:be angry, I could be sad.
Speaker:Lots of emotions come up and this
Speaker:one was a little bit different because instead of.
Speaker:Me blaming her for being an alcoholic, for failing to pull her
Speaker:own weight in the marriage or whatever story I have in my mind
Speaker:about everything that she's doing wrong and how this crisis moment
Speaker:is all of her construction.
Speaker:I thought about who she married
Speaker:when we were 29 and I thought about who she was with right now.
Speaker:In other words, I empathized.
Speaker:And empathy, this exercise of
Speaker:taking another person's perspective.
Speaker:It can be.
Speaker:You can completely fail.
Speaker:You can construct a story in your mind, and it's nothing but your
Speaker:own fictional account has zero.
Speaker:You've created a character out of
Speaker:another person, so that can go wrong.
Speaker:Another thing that can go wrong is you project.
Speaker:You say, well, this is the way I think about it.
Speaker:This way I feel.
Speaker:So the whole rest of the world
Speaker:must think that way too, which reduces you to the developmental
Speaker:state of a toddler, you know? Real empathy requires you to set
Speaker:aside whatever your own agenda is, and typically in a situation like
Speaker:that, it's going to hurt because that setting aside means
Speaker:dissolving your ego.
Speaker:And even then, maybe you don't get
Speaker:it right, but you might get some insight.
Speaker:So I thought about it from her perspective.
Speaker:She married a guy who was handsome, fit and had excellent
Speaker:prospects. I was never lean, but you know,
Speaker:when she married me, I was probably one ninety, five six feet
Speaker:tall and at one ninety five i look OK right now I'm two fourteen i
Speaker:weighed myself this morning and.
Speaker:I look OK, but you know, I don't
Speaker:know, i'm still, I still feel I still have the identity of a fat
Speaker:guy. And when I get on that body fat
Speaker:meter it says 28 %, which I know is another five pounds away from
Speaker:being, at least according to a body fat estimate, obese.
Speaker:So I'm not out of the woods.
Speaker:But at 29 she was stuck with a
Speaker:bespectacled obese. Professor who didn't make a lot of
Speaker:money. We're chronically in debt.
Speaker:It wasn't where she thought she was going.
Speaker:So I sat her down and I said, you're going to see some changes
Speaker:in me. I'm gonna be getting myself back
Speaker:into shape. I'm gonna be getting us on a
Speaker:stronger financial footing.
Speaker:I'm gonna be upgrading my
Speaker:wardrobe, taking a little bit more pride in myself.
Speaker:No, I still wasn't happy with her.
Speaker:Like all these other emotions.
Speaker:They still.
Speaker:You know.
Speaker:The anger, the sadness, the fear, they still come up.
Speaker:But in this conversation, it's not about her.
Speaker:It's about what am I gonna change? And so I said, this is these.
Speaker:You're going to see some changes now.
Speaker:We've been married years.
Speaker:1617 years and you can imagine
Speaker:that a wife hearing.
Speaker:So after 17 years husband comes to
Speaker:her and says, well, there's going to be some changes.
Speaker:Nobody's going to believe that.
Speaker:She said, why are you telling me
Speaker:this? I said because we're married, and
Speaker:when one person in a marriage starts making changes, the other
Speaker:person's gonna notice.
Speaker:And I'm I know you're going to
Speaker:notice, and I want you to know to hear it from me about what's going
Speaker:on. But it wasn't Full disclosure.
Speaker:I had read a book called No More mister Nice Guy, and it sounds
Speaker:awful. You know, why shouldn't we be nice
Speaker:to one another? And the answer in the book is.
Speaker:Because the typical nice guy is creating a bunch of covert
Speaker:contracts. If I do this, then she'll do that.
Speaker:She'll owe me this.
Speaker:Then I'll deserve or be entitled
Speaker:to that. The nice guy has these hidden
Speaker:agreements in his head that the rest of the world never agreed to.
Speaker:And then when they break the covert contract, whether it's your
Speaker:wife or whether it's your boss or anybody, could be your kids.
Speaker:It happens a lot.
Speaker:Then resentment like wells up in
Speaker:you. How dare they.
Speaker:But do the thing that they never agreed to do.
Speaker:And that no relationship can survive resentment.
Speaker:And so the no more mister Nice guy is really about no more covert
Speaker:contracts, no more carrying around all these resentments about what
Speaker:the world and your wife and other people aren't giving you that you
Speaker:thought you deserved because you were a good boy.
Speaker:That's, you know, 8 year old thinking, not adult thinking.
Speaker:So I'd read that book and I realized that if I wanted changes
Speaker:in my marriage and I wanted to change this from my in my life, I
Speaker:was going to have to lead those changes now.
Speaker:Since then, there's a concept called the 10000 thousand foot tow
Speaker:rope. Have you ever heard this?
Speaker:Ok, so I got this from a guy who's on YouTube.
Speaker:He's on Twitter.
Speaker:He contacted me because of the
Speaker:stuff that I write about, my relationships and all this
Speaker:autobiographical stuff. And he's written, he's in the
Speaker:middle of his second book.
Speaker:He's deep in the red pill
Speaker:literature, and he used to be in the Canadian Navy.
Speaker:His name is Ryan Stone.
Speaker:You can find him on Twitter.
Speaker:You can find him on YouTube.
Speaker:And he said, well, in the Navy
Speaker:there's this concept called the 10000.
Speaker:Thousand you have a lead ship, and then you have a rope, and it goes
Speaker:to the ship that it's towing when the lead ship makes a turn.
Speaker:Well, 10000 thousand feet behind you know, it takes like a year for
Speaker:the towing ship to make the turn.
Speaker:And I didn't think of it this at
Speaker:the time, but it was a very helpful concept to explain after
Speaker:the fact. I knew I was going to have to
Speaker:lead, but I didn't have an appreciation for how long would it
Speaker:take for my wife to follow.
Speaker:Some marriages, you know, there's
Speaker:a 10000 thousand foot tow rope and some marriage, it's 10 foot tow
Speaker:rope. You're like, great, you wait a
Speaker:week and then she's making changes too.
Speaker:My marriage was a 10000 thousand foot toe.
Speaker:Rope six months.
Speaker:I was getting myself in shape.
Speaker:My daughter wrote out she had a trainer for, you know, school
Speaker:sports and I asked her for exercises.
Speaker:Could, you know, could you show me some extra?
Speaker:I'm going to go to the gym.
Speaker:You know, she's like, dad, this is
Speaker:great. And she got a sheet of paper and
Speaker:she wrote at the top of it the Fat daddy workout.
Speaker:And she started drawing and I thought, that's the end of that.
Speaker:Like there is.
Speaker:If I'm going to do this, there is
Speaker:no pride. Left, I'm gonna go to one of these
Speaker:gyms, you know, suburban Phoenix, where all these buff people are
Speaker:working out in their spandex hide tech, whatever.
Speaker:I'm going to walk in there a fat old man, and I'm going to do the
Speaker:exercises that my daughter told me to do because I want to change my
Speaker:life. She was thrilled, so she helped me
Speaker:out. And you know, I did.
Speaker:I started making progress.
Speaker:I remember I was late to class.
Speaker:It was my, you know, weight training class and I'm going to do
Speaker:and it's a very popular class because I'm 5 minutes late.
Speaker:The room's already full.
Speaker:I'm like, God darn it, well, I
Speaker:know there's a core class next door at this gym that I go to and
Speaker:the smaller room, and so I'm going to bust into the core class.
Speaker:I'm going to do that today.
Speaker:So I run in, getting my math
Speaker:middle of the room, and music's already planned and I look around
Speaker:and it's all women.
Speaker:I'm like this is not the core
Speaker:class. If this is pregnancy Pilates or
Speaker:something, I'm screwed.
Speaker:They're doing a warm up routine
Speaker:and I'm like, in the middle of this, what am I going to do, run
Speaker:back out? I'm mortified just by the fact
Speaker:that I've drawn attention to myself and I see one guy hiding up
Speaker:in the corner of the room and he's stretching.
Speaker:I'm like, well, fuck it, I'm going to do this thing.
Speaker:It turned out to be a bar class.
Speaker:No, I didn't know what bar was BA.
Speaker:Rre I always thought that was called ballet.
Speaker:But you know, the chicks who teach this stuff, they call it bar.
Speaker:And every once in a while a dude will accidentally walk into a
Speaker:class that he thought was about barbells or something.
Speaker:And I'm doing please and what A and it's fantastic.
Speaker:The instructor, she's beautiful and she's live and she's mixing in
Speaker:some of these martial arts stuff, and it's musical and it's a hell
Speaker:of a workout.
Speaker:And I went up to her afterwards.
Speaker:And I said, what did I just do? And she said, oh, it's called life
Speaker:bar. You know, we do this and this and
Speaker:she's really selling it.
Speaker:I went to that class for a year
Speaker:wow when I put away my mate that day, I didn't know this guy, but
Speaker:he passed me on the way out.
Speaker:He said, thanks for staying.
Speaker:You know, he, I don't know if he was in the wrong room either.
Speaker:And I never saw him again.
Speaker:So a year I go to this class and I
Speaker:got down to about two oh five.
Speaker:And that was a good forty pounds
Speaker:that i'd lost.
Speaker:I had to put myself on a diet and
Speaker:I called it the great food diet, so it works like this.
Speaker:If it ain't great, I ain't eating.
Speaker:I just don't eat that stuff.
Speaker:I had to make an identity shift, and this identity shift was I'm
Speaker:going to turn myself into a food snob and no margarine in my life.
Speaker:There's no Doritos in my life.
Speaker:There's like, for me, I could eat
Speaker:a doughnut, but only if it was like a gourmet God damn doughnut.
Speaker:Like when I went to Portland, oregon, and they had the homemade
Speaker:Donuts with the bacon stuff on or whatever the heck it was, I'm
Speaker:going to eat the freaking donut because it's a great donut.
Speaker:No, I don't eat doughnuts.
Speaker:Much anymore, but i put myself on
Speaker:the great food diet and I remember going to a faculty lunch.
Speaker:And you know, they have crap at these faculty lunches and
Speaker:everybody's eating. And somebody said, Ohh, would you
Speaker:like half of my sandwich, you know, did they run out of food?
Speaker:I see you're not eating.
Speaker:And I said, no, I'm eating
Speaker:everything I want to have right now.
Speaker:Which was nothing.
Speaker:So it was confusing sometimes for
Speaker:other people. Well, since then like intermittent
Speaker:fasting has become like a huge thing.
Speaker:So if I go to a faculty lunch and I'm not eating.
Speaker:And fasting, you know, and everybody.
Speaker:Ohh yeah.
Speaker:Yeah, I read about that.
Speaker:I saw that on the Internet or something yeah but when they send
Speaker:me the little questionnaire, you know, about your dietary
Speaker:requirement, do you have any dietary restrictions?
Speaker:And now I always send it back and I say yes carnivore i don't know
Speaker:what to do.
Speaker:You know, they're like, can you
Speaker:eat gluten? No, I can't.
Speaker:Can you eat animals? No i'm seventh level vegan and
Speaker:they would accommodate me.
Speaker:Or what if I wrote I can't eat
Speaker:anything that casts a shadow? They would say, OK, we're going to
Speaker:find earthworms for you or something like that.
Speaker:When I put down carnivore and they don't know what to do there, it's
Speaker:not like there's going to be meat at the, you know, lunch.
Speaker:Not in seriously.
Speaker:So the food environment in which
Speaker:we live is often oriented towards keeping us sick in the same way
Speaker:that my mother was putting margarine on the table instead of
Speaker:butter. So I lost a lot of weight and I
Speaker:sat my wife down again, and this was six months later, and this was
Speaker:a different conversation.
Speaker:I said I no longer want to be
Speaker:married to an alcoholic.
Speaker:So you have a choice.
Speaker:You can sober up, you can get yourself in a program.
Speaker:And you can stay married or you can be divorced.
Speaker:So this is an ultimatum.
Speaker:And it may not have been a wise
Speaker:choice, because not a lot of marriages, not a lot of
Speaker:relationships, period, can survive an ultimatum.
Speaker:But addiction is a bitch.
Speaker:And it wasn't just me that didn't
Speaker:want to be married to a drunk.
Speaker:It was I didn't want my kids to
Speaker:have a drunk for a mother either.
Speaker:She, as you can imagine,
Speaker:protested. And I went into Alanon, but her
Speaker:older sister was very helpful, took her to a, got her going, got
Speaker:her into the big book.
Speaker:She sobered right up, lost 20
Speaker:pounds, got herself off her blood pressure medication and divorced
Speaker:me. So that was, I mean, she took A
Speaker:and B and she kind of combined them into her own recipe.
Speaker:And that's what I mean by.
Speaker:Not a lot of relationships can
Speaker:survive that kind of ultimatum, but she now has an associates
Speaker:degree in addiction counseling.
Speaker:She's, you know, stayed clean all
Speaker:these years, maybe seven years now.
Speaker:And more power to her.
Speaker:I think she understands herself a
Speaker:lot better. And that was really the beginning
Speaker:of my journey.
Speaker:Like everything else is preamble.
Speaker:So since then I was sort of, what's the.
Speaker:I don't want to be too metaphorical about it.
Speaker:We separated, we divorced, and now I'm living the life of a bachelor
Speaker:again, and I have a lot to figure out.
Speaker:So I have just brought you up to, you know, probably 2016 or
Speaker:something like that in my life eventually reached like 190 pounds
Speaker:and I looked at myself in the mirror and I looked a lot better.
Speaker:But I still felt fat.
Speaker:My you know, my body fat came
Speaker:down, but it was still 20 %.
Speaker:And I thought.
Speaker:I don't see 180 in my future.
Speaker:I don't.
Speaker:I don't think I'm ever gonna be one of those guys that fits into
Speaker:the insurance tables, you know? And I got a scare.
Speaker:I had.
Speaker:Got my labs back.
Speaker:Now I'm, you know, out on the dating market and I'm more
Speaker:self-conscious about my wardrobe and I'm trying to figure out what
Speaker:dating is like.
Speaker:I'm trying to figure out health.
Speaker:I'm trying to figure out who am I going to turn myself into.
Speaker:I got all my blood work done.
Speaker:You know, my Omega sixes are way
Speaker:out of whack.
Speaker:I'm learning a few things.
Speaker:My cholesterol is all high.
Speaker:Turns out that's a good thing, you
Speaker:know, because my triglyceride to HDL ratio is doing great.
Speaker:And my prostate specific antigen is way too freaking high.
Speaker:It's like 7 what the hell is PSA? So I gotta go and I gotta Internet
Speaker:search around and learn about that means I'm at an elevated risk for
Speaker:prostate cancer. Well, damn it, Nathan, now I'm
Speaker:like. Did I just have difficulty
Speaker:urinating what? Like, I'm looking for all these
Speaker:other symptoms that are running through my head.
Speaker:Was that difficulty or was that just, I don't know, like, do it?
Speaker:What are you supposed to do if I were married and had kids?
Speaker:They'd say, dad, you gotta get to the doctor.
Speaker:You know, my wife would say, ohh you should you have to get that
Speaker:checked out. But I'm not.
Speaker:I'm it's just me now, right? And so I started talking to guys,
Speaker:some of them older, some of them younger.
Speaker:And it's such an awkward conversation.
Speaker:Guys don't talk about this anywhere near, you know, a woman
Speaker:has a pap smear and then the next thing you know, it's the topic of
Speaker:lunch for her and the whole social matrix.
Speaker:Like, they'll talk about these things, but dudes aren't going to
Speaker:bring it up.
Speaker:So for me, it's kind of awkward.
Speaker:And I'm like, you know, I had a PSA test done the other day and I
Speaker:got my like, yeah, revealing nothing.
Speaker:I said, well.
Speaker:It came back a little high, yeah.
Speaker:Well, it was seven, you know, and I did yeah and like, well, have
Speaker:you ever done this? Yeah and once you get them going,
Speaker:they had turns out half my friends had biopsies or prostatectomies
Speaker:and I'm talking to them about this.
Speaker:And this is not a good time for me to go two years without an
Speaker:erection, like I trying to figure out women and what I want my life
Speaker:to be like.
Speaker:And I'm like, the hell with that.
Speaker:I'm not going to get the biopsy.
Speaker:I'm not even going to go in for
Speaker:the exam. I'm not going to touch any of this
Speaker:allopathic medicine nothing by this time I was taking cold
Speaker:showers. My partner Jason and I were doing
Speaker:ice baths. You know where you buy.
Speaker:Two hundred pounds of ice and you put it in the tub and it's
Speaker:Phoenix, it all melts.
Speaker:Like we weren't satisfied with
Speaker:that. There's nothing on the market that
Speaker:we could buy that would make ice.
Speaker:So we got a freezer compressor and
Speaker:we got copper coils and we got a tub and we're, you know, trying to
Speaker:figure out how to wrap things up and we'd made these working
Speaker:prototypes so by this time.
Speaker:I had an ice bath on my porch.
Speaker:You know, it was like the fourth forge we ever made.
Speaker:And I'm scared.
Speaker:I knew enough about managing blood
Speaker:sugar, and I knew enough about diet because my son was diagnosed
Speaker:with diabetes when he was six years old.
Speaker:I knew some things about metabolism.
Speaker:And instead of going to the doctor, I said.
Speaker:I'm going to treat this thing with ketosis and ice baths.
Speaker:I'm going to cycle myself in and out of keto and I know the ice
Speaker:bath can help with that and I'm going to see where I stand.
Speaker:Sure enough, it took less than six months.
Speaker:I'd brought my PSA down to 0 8, which is totally out of the risk
Speaker:zone. And you know what was I, 52 or
Speaker:something like this is almost five years ago?
Speaker:And I'm checking all these labs and one of the things, you know,
Speaker:male health profile or whatever.
Speaker:So my PSA looks good
Speaker:congratulations. And my testosterone went through
Speaker:the roof. Now it had good testosterone.
Speaker:I was like 700 or something.
Speaker:But it came back and the way it
Speaker:works in my lab, if something is out of range, it comes with a big
Speaker:red like exclamation.
Speaker:H for high or L for low or
Speaker:whatever. And there wasn't big freaking red
Speaker:letters. 1178 nanograms per deciliter.
Speaker:It's off the gaulding chart, so I had to look that up.
Speaker:Turns out I had the testosterone of like an over six nineteen year
Speaker:old and I'm walking around 53 year old, man.
Speaker:Jason says, well, that's just because, you know, you're out on
Speaker:the dating market and you know, like when you're married and you
Speaker:have kids, your testosterone goes down and you've lost a lot of
Speaker:weight and there's all these other peripheral factors that can
Speaker:contribute and they can, but they don't take a 53 year old fat guy
Speaker:up to 1178 So I said to Jason, well, have you been checked?
Speaker:And he's like, why would I? I said because we're trying to do
Speaker:something. We're trying to understand health
Speaker:here and because that's a good point.
Speaker:So every birthday he gets checked.
Speaker:He went up from five fifty to like
Speaker:nine seventeen doing the same thing that I was doing, and that
Speaker:was ice baths.
Speaker:And then, you know, it was kind of
Speaker:by accident after the ice bath, you come out and it's cold
Speaker:especially, you know, in Phoenix it might get down to 40 something
Speaker:degrees. It's really not bad.
Speaker:But I get out of the ice bath and I'm chilly.
Speaker:So what am I going to do? Some jumping jacks and push-ups?
Speaker:Some steel? It doesn't take a lot.
Speaker:Turns out there's a study in Japan, 1991 They took a bunch of
Speaker:Japanese college students and they put him on the exercise back, put
Speaker:him in the ice bath.
Speaker:And this is the way most people do
Speaker:it, ice bath for exercise recovery.
Speaker:But when they did it that way, testosterone went way down.
Speaker:And then they switched it.
Speaker:And I don't know why they switched
Speaker:it cause nobody in the early nineties was doing.
Speaker:This but, they said OK, we'll do the ice bath first, then we'll do
Speaker:the exercise. Testosterone, weigh the hell up.
Speaker:I went to my urologist with this report.
Speaker:And he said, OK, Tom, you know, he was about my age and he didn't let
Speaker:on that he thought I was juicing ohh he's like, well, there's just
Speaker:one more test you want to do.
Speaker:Well, I'm sending you back to the
Speaker:lab. We'll get your and you didn't even
Speaker:tell me what it was.
Speaker:Turns out to be luteinizing
Speaker:hormone. Luteinizing hormone signals the
Speaker:gonads to produce testosterone if you're on some kind of
Speaker:testosterone replacement therapy or if you're supplementing with
Speaker:exogenous testosterone tostring? Your testicles and your
Speaker:bloodstream. Plenty of testosterone.
Speaker:You don't need any luteinizing hormones, so your luteinizing
Speaker:hormone will be depressed.
Speaker:And he wanted to know.
Speaker:So I get this other one checked.
Speaker:It's off the freaking charts.
Speaker:Big Red exclamation mark again.
Speaker:It's all naturally stimulated.
Speaker:Jason repeats the thing.
Speaker:And it turns out accidentally I
Speaker:was doing exactly what the Japanese study did, reversing it,
Speaker:but doing the ice bath.
Speaker:I'm not working out, you know, I
Speaker:do my ballet class.
Speaker:Which is not the most masculine
Speaker:testosterone. And he's like, yeah, but you're
Speaker:surrounded by beautiful women, you know, and maybe that's a really
Speaker:good thing. But he married, living with his
Speaker:wife. He's got kids, and he was running
Speaker:at about nine twenty by the time he instituted this program.
Speaker:So I wish we had, like, some official I should write a book
Speaker:called the Testosterone Protocol and put myself on the cover with a
Speaker:steel Mace and stuff like that.
Speaker:But the fact is you do the ice
Speaker:bath, you get out, you do some.
Speaker:Jumping Jacks, do some push-ups,
Speaker:do some pull-ups.
Speaker:I really like the steel Mace, jump
Speaker:some rope, just doesn't.
Speaker:That doesn't take a lot.
Speaker:It was just 20 minutes of exercise bike that boosted all these
Speaker:college students T levels.
Speaker:We are meant as men to maintain
Speaker:healthy levels of testosterone and it ain't what they call normal.
Speaker:Normal is now sick because they assay a whole swath of the
Speaker:population. We say, well, we pulled
Speaker:testosterone samples from 10000.
Speaker:Thousand guys and, they averaged
Speaker:400 So 400 is normal, 400 is sick.
Speaker:We are, you know, evolutionarily
Speaker:wired to maintain healthy.
Speaker:And by healthy I mean like nine
Speaker:hundred seven, fifty something up there that other people would, you
Speaker:know, your doctors say, well, you're doing great.
Speaker:Not normal.
Speaker:And there's no reason we can't
Speaker:keep that. So anyway, I wrote this article,
Speaker:which you've read, and somebody posted a comment and they were
Speaker:like, yeah, but Doctor Seeger, how you doing now?
Speaker:I'm in a monogamous relationship.
Speaker:I'm dating a woman with four
Speaker:daughters. It's the closest facsimile to, you
Speaker:know, being married.
Speaker:I'm not out there playing the
Speaker:field or going to the clubs or anything like that.
Speaker:And it's a fair question.
Speaker:I've gained probably 20 pounds
Speaker:since my last Test.
Speaker:So you got to think if this whole
Speaker:protocol, the ice Bath exercise protocol, if it's any good?
Speaker:It better show up in my bloodstream, so frankly.
Speaker:Nathan, I was a little nervous, but i go to the lab, I'm like, I
Speaker:wonder what's coming at 1075 Wow.
Speaker:It's like it's still it's not bad
Speaker:for a 56 year old fat guy.
Speaker:There's no reason I'm in my head
Speaker:to be at 400 Because you can find enough cold, you don't have to buy
Speaker:a ten thousand, dollar, you know, marasco but.
Speaker:The ocean is great.
Speaker:South Africa Tim Noakes is South
Speaker:African, if I remember correctly, and when Lewis Pugh was going for
Speaker:some cold water swimming record, I think he went to South Africa to
Speaker:swim in the cold ocean there, and Tim Nokes supervised the swim.
Speaker:Most people can find some cold.
Speaker:When I love about your story is
Speaker:basically you've made a point of mentioning a few, I think you
Speaker:called them like pivotal points or inflection points.
Speaker:And it's the reason that things have shifted in the positive
Speaker:direction is because, well, at least what I'm hearing is that
Speaker:you've taken responsibility is that when there were those moments
Speaker:where you could have either collapsed or gone deeper into
Speaker:like, the blame and the judgment and pushing it outward, you went,
Speaker:OK, this is clearly about me.
Speaker:And yeah, other people have their
Speaker:own things, but what about me? Like, how can I show up
Speaker:differently in this situation? I think really right now, as we
Speaker:are navigating a really weird time in human history of.
Speaker:Where there's like this top down push for like he's like the food
Speaker:pyramid. I mean have you seen that list
Speaker:recently where they show the most recommended foods?
Speaker:And it's I think like Cheerios or somewhere near or Lucky Charms are
Speaker:near the top and meat and eggs are literally at the bottom.
Speaker:I mean it's astonishing my mother could have written the question.
Speaker:It's very difficult for a small planet right So the question I
Speaker:want to ask you is i saw that you, you're working with something or
Speaker:you've developed something that you call self actual engineering.
Speaker:And so for I'm really wanting to be in service to whoever's
Speaker:listening to this.
Speaker:Obviously having heard your
Speaker:journey, which I think is a beautiful example of a journey of
Speaker:transformation, of taking the opportunity to learn from life
Speaker:lessons and actually at some point go, you know what?
Speaker:I can't keep listening to the society because it's making me
Speaker:sick. So what can I do instead?
Speaker:And so the question I'd like to ask you is.
Speaker:What is self actual engineering and how can we use it, as you say,
Speaker:to redesign ourselves, our relationships and our lives to
Speaker:realize more of our fullest potential?
Speaker:So I'm glad you asked, because there's no such thing as self
Speaker:actual engineering. It's something I made-up you know,
Speaker:I didn't have a word for what I wanted to do.
Speaker:I read a book called Maslow on Management.
Speaker:There all the great you know psychologists seem to come from
Speaker:Vienna. There must be something in the
Speaker:water. In Vienna you have Freud, you have
Speaker:Adler, you have Victor Frankel.
Speaker:The two most famous American
Speaker:psychologists are probably BF Skinner, whose famous for
Speaker:teaching, you know, pigeons, how to play ping pong and Maslow and
Speaker:while Victor Frankel was in a Nazi.
Speaker:Concentration Camp Maslow published something called a
Speaker:hierarchy of human motivation.
Speaker:He's a really interesting guy.
Speaker:Maslow did his doctorate with Harry Harlow at University of
Speaker:Wisconsin. Madison, which probably means
Speaker:nothing. You're like, but do they have a
Speaker:good rugby team? You know, but in the United
Speaker:States, it's a prestigious public university.
Speaker:And Harry Harlow's thing was torturing Reese's monkeys.
Speaker:So Maslow is a student.
Speaker:Now let me put some perspective on
Speaker:it. What do I mean by torturing?
Speaker:Harlow would create these experiments where he would remove
Speaker:the infant monkey from the mother and he'd put it in a cage.
Speaker:And in the cage it had a chicken wire facsimile of a mother with a,
Speaker:you know, a baby bottle coming out where the nipples supposed to be
Speaker:so the monkey could feed.
Speaker:At the time, BF Skinners ideas on
Speaker:operant conditioning dominated the American School of thought.
Speaker:In psychology, the infant only bonds with the mother because it
Speaker:is the source of sustenance.
Speaker:This was the height of the
Speaker:Industrial Revolution and Skinners you know, teaching pigeons to play
Speaker:ping pong by rewarding them with food pellets was the ideal
Speaker:psychological paradigm for the factory.
Speaker:All you have to do is gather these workers.
Speaker:And set up a system of punishments and rewards, and they will mold
Speaker:themselves into the machine and behave in the way that you want
Speaker:them to have to make you rich.
Speaker:So operant conditioning is a
Speaker:pretty low level of understanding of psychology, and it's meant.
Speaker:To make good factory workers.
Speaker:Skinner was in the service of the
Speaker:Industrial Revolution, but Harlow, who doesn't sound.
Speaker:I've never met him, and I don't know him.
Speaker:But these? From our modern perspective, these
Speaker:experiments sound incredibly cruel.
Speaker:Harlow was testing this operant conditioning hypothesis.
Speaker:And when you think about how cruel child labor is and how cruel the
Speaker:factories were at the time, nineteen thirties, maybe it didn't
Speaker:seem like such a bad thing to put a monkey in a cage and give it a
Speaker:bottle. Lot of orphans were metaphorically
Speaker:raised in cages like this.
Speaker:So he's testing this idea.
Speaker:Is it just the sustenance? Is it just the food?
Speaker:So then he eventually he separates the bottle, he puts the bottle on
Speaker:one side of the cage, and he puts this chicken wire facsimile of a
Speaker:mother on the other side of the cage.
Speaker:And he's got this infant monkey.
Speaker:Maybe infant is in the right word,
Speaker:but you know what I mean.
Speaker:A juvenile Reese's monkey.
Speaker:And then he scares it.
Speaker:Which way does it run?
Speaker:Does it run to the bottle, which feeds it?
Speaker:Or does it run to the chicken wire?
Speaker:You know where it goes.
Speaker:It goes to the one where he tied
Speaker:buttons, where the eyes are supposed to be.
Speaker:And he put like a little sweater on a piece of the chicken wire so
Speaker:that the monkey would have something soft to cling to.
Speaker:Operant conditioning is bullshit.
Speaker:It's not that it doesn't work,
Speaker:it's not like we can't train people or pigeons or whatever.
Speaker:But what Harlow showed is that there's a deeper attraction.
Speaker:There's something more fundamental between the child and the mother.
Speaker:Now we know a lot more.
Speaker:We know about oxytocin, we know
Speaker:about vasopressin, we know about the neurochemistry of bonding.
Speaker:Didn't have that at the time.
Speaker:So Maslow's most famous American
Speaker:psychologist ever is a young man, and he's growing up in.
Speaker:You know, this lab environment where they're torturing monkeys
Speaker:like their factory workers to try and prove something about the
Speaker:human condition. It's 1943 What does Maslow begin
Speaker:to study? He starts as a sex researcher.
Speaker:He's like, well, what is love? You know what?
Speaker:And he starts, you know, interviewing college students
Speaker:about their masturbation habits and their dating habits and stuff,
Speaker:which was very ahead of his time in a way, right?
Speaker:In 1943 he publishes the hierarchy of human motivation.
Speaker:And sex is not anywhere in it.
Speaker:He doesn't touch it at all.
Speaker:Whatever his curiosity was, something in Maslow was like.
Speaker:I'm out.
Speaker:I'm not gonna do that anymore.
Speaker:I've learned enough.
Speaker:There's something about the
Speaker:operant conditioning. We need safety, we need security,
Speaker:we need shelter.
Speaker:And it's at that.
Speaker:He put at the very bottom of his hierarchy of human motivation,
Speaker:these hedonic drives.
Speaker:That's where Freud lives.
Speaker:It's all about sex and pleasure and security and safety.
Speaker:And then he said, you can go a little further up.
Speaker:No it's about interpersonal relationships.
Speaker:It's about social acceptance.
Speaker:It's about.
Speaker:Being loved in the sense of belonging.
Speaker:That's where Adler is.
Speaker:Well, psychological problems,
Speaker:Adler would say, are interpersonal problems.
Speaker:It's the drive to control other people to this, the status
Speaker:hierarchy. This is what motivates.
Speaker:So Freud's like, it's all about the hedonic pleasure.
Speaker:And Adler say no it's about interpersonal power.
Speaker:And Maslow says no, I've seen more than this.
Speaker:It's about self esteem.
Speaker:It's about mastery.
Speaker:It's about realizing your fullest potential.
Speaker:And he coined this phrase called self actualization, which means
Speaker:nothing, as far as I can tell.
Speaker:I'm like, you know, you had
Speaker:another 50 years, or give or take 40 years.
Speaker:Could you tell us what this means? And has been very controversial,
Speaker:and it's this idea of realizing your fullest potential.
Speaker:And I don't really buy it, but I do know that we will give up
Speaker:pleasure. We will give up.
Speaker:Acceptance, sense of belonging.
Speaker:We will go our own way because
Speaker:we're working on something in ourselves.
Speaker:Maslow isn't wrong when he said, you know, we do have this drive
Speaker:towards mastery, autonomy.
Speaker:And self esteem.
Speaker:But then Frankel is released.
Speaker:He's liberated from the
Speaker:concentration camps, and he eventually publishes a book called
Speaker:Man's Search for meaning.
Speaker:And I'm going to kind of condense
Speaker:it. Man can withstand almost any
Speaker:deprivation. If he has a reason why, because he
Speaker:saw it in the concentration camps.
Speaker:It is the people who had meaning
Speaker:to their lives who lasted the longest.
Speaker:If you had, he goes, we knew a guy would be dead in the morning if he
Speaker:lit a cigarette at night.
Speaker:Because cigarettes were currency,
Speaker:and if you're going to light that up, it means you've given up, and
Speaker:when you give up, you're going to die.
Speaker:So Frankel challenged this idea that the hierarchy that Maslow
Speaker:built had to be filled in from the bottom.
Speaker:You don't need to satisfy your safety, shelter, food, sex needs,
Speaker:your hedonic needs, and then move up, and then move up, and then you
Speaker:move all over the place.
Speaker:It's a complexity of human
Speaker:motivations and. Maslow got turned into the
Speaker:hierarchy of human needs rather than human motivations, which is
Speaker:what he originally published.
Speaker:So, you know, I'm in this
Speaker:reflective period of my life and we're starting a company.
Speaker:I read a book called Maslow on Management.
Speaker:And I'm becoming kind of a fan of Abraham Maslow in general now.
Speaker:When it was first published, it was called something like.
Speaker:You securian psychology, or some obscure like, I've butchered the
Speaker:title, but the idea was positive psychology.
Speaker:So much of psychology is focused on the deranged and the disordered
Speaker:and maslow's like, hey, what about the people who are pretty much
Speaker:basically OK? We do.
Speaker:We ever study them.
Speaker:And so we got republished in a
Speaker:much more alliterative and catchy title called Maslow on Management.
Speaker:And it was when he went to, he spent a year or something in a
Speaker:Silicon Valley firm just studying how people work and what I got out
Speaker:of that as a teacher.
Speaker:Is that you cannot take someone
Speaker:who's at one developmental stage and pretend that they're in
Speaker:another. Here I was thinking that the best
Speaker:thing I could do as a teacher was grant autonomy to my students.
Speaker:Give them independence, give them the freedom to explore.
Speaker:And what Maslow taught me was you're just scaring the shit out
Speaker:of him. Like at this stage they are.
Speaker:I got a 20 year old engineering student and most of them are going
Speaker:to be just tell me what to do.
Speaker:Tell me what problem worksheet I'm
Speaker:supposed to do.
Speaker:Tell me what the right answers
Speaker:are. Just tell me how I can graduate,
Speaker:get a good job, pay these student loans, and make my parents proud
Speaker:of me. Not everybody is looking for this
Speaker:self-directed autonomous freedom.
Speaker:Some people are just going to
Speaker:panic, is what Maslow said, because you're throwing them back
Speaker:on their own resources and they don't feel capable of figuring out
Speaker:fluid mechanics for themselves.
Speaker:Because you gave them the freedom,
Speaker:you know, to invent Bernoulli's equation or whatever the hell it's
Speaker:gonna be.
Speaker:You know, this is the way we work
Speaker:in engineering. And I'm like, ohh, I've been a
Speaker:jerk. And it I was ready for that
Speaker:because one of the things that I got from Alanon was the
Speaker:realization that I'm an asshole.
Speaker:And look, I got at least 20 years
Speaker:of blaming other people.
Speaker:And Nathan, I'm really good at it.
Speaker:I have a lot of practice.
Speaker:And I went into Helen on and was
Speaker:an all men's group.
Speaker:The mixed groups are much gentler
Speaker:with one another, I think.
Speaker:But you this group anyway, you
Speaker:know, in Phoenix, all men.
Speaker:I go in there and I'm like.
Speaker:Yeah, this is my situation.
Speaker:You know, my wife's a drunk and
Speaker:giving her an alternate Wawa, Wawa.
Speaker:And they listened to me.
Speaker:And one of the guys said, well,
Speaker:you're an asshole.
Speaker:Why am I me?
Speaker:I'm not the one.
Speaker:Look, I've already quit drinking,
Speaker:you know, I've.
Speaker:And he goes.
Speaker:No, you're treating your wife like she's some kind of grown up.
Speaker:Well, she is a grown up.
Speaker:No, she's not.
Speaker:Her brain stopped working the moment she started drinking.
Speaker:How old was she when she started drinking?
Speaker:And I'm like, well, you know, probably 17 and go you're married
Speaker:to a 17 year old, they said.
Speaker:Because once she starts drinking
Speaker:she starts stops developing.
Speaker:And I thought.
Speaker:Holy shit.
Speaker:That makes sense.
Speaker:If I reframe my marriage as now, you know, she's a year older than
Speaker:me. But if I reframe it is I'm married
Speaker:to someone who's developmentally stopped growing when she was 17,
Speaker:then her behavior makes sense and my expectations of her all false.
Speaker:This guy and alanon, he says you're treating your wife like
Speaker:she's some kind of self determined mature adult.
Speaker:She's a brain damaged drunk.
Speaker:It's like.
Speaker:I'm an asshole because you can't take a brain damage drunk who's
Speaker:been. Drinking for her 35 some years and
Speaker:expect her to make mature, well reasoned choices.
Speaker:I had to make a change.
Speaker:And the analogy is I can't expect
Speaker:that everybody comes to me in the classroom or in the at work, you
Speaker:know, at miraz Co forge and they're ready for this autonomy
Speaker:and this mastery and this self act stuff.
Speaker:Some people there are different places in the pyramid, you know
Speaker:that they want to be told what to do because they get safety and
Speaker:security and a paycheck.
Speaker:And that's right for them.
Speaker:So I thought, all of these psychologists, they're all right.
Speaker:They're incomplete, but they're right.
Speaker:What am I gonna do? I'm no longer interested as an
Speaker:engineer in working at the bottom of the pyramid, because what do
Speaker:civil engineers do? Ohh Nathan, you don't have clean
Speaker:water. I can take care of that.
Speaker:You don't have a road? I can do that.
Speaker:You need a house.
Speaker:I can do that.
Speaker:Where do civil engineers work? At the bottom of the damn pyramid?
Speaker:Food, shelter, clothing, basic infrastructure.
Speaker:I my whole career has been at the bottom of the damn pyramid.
Speaker:Except I'm a teacher and so you know, I want to develop human
Speaker:beings. I want them to learn.
Speaker:I want them to obtain mastery and self esteem and all that stuff.
Speaker:I said screw that, I'm not doing civil engineering anymore.
Speaker:I'm going to do something different now.
Speaker:I don't have a word for it, but it was inspired by Maslow.
Speaker:It's now self actual engineering.
Speaker:How would you redesign yourself to
Speaker:actualize more of your full potential?
Speaker:To work higher in the pyramid.
Speaker:What is it that you're working on?
Speaker:Well, I'm out in the dating world.
Speaker:I want acceptance.
Speaker:I want belonging.
Speaker:I want close relationships.
Speaker:I want a sense of my own self esteem.
Speaker:I want autonomy.
Speaker:I want independence.
Speaker:I want all these to and at the very top where Frankel resides.
Speaker:I want a meaningful life.
Speaker:What is it that I'm going to do
Speaker:with all of these skills, educationally vocationally, that
Speaker:I've accumulated in the 1st 50 years of my life?
Speaker:What am I going to do with the next 50 years that is meaningful?
Speaker:So yeah, I started the sub stack self actual engineering.
Speaker:I don't know if anybody can find it because the number of people
Speaker:Googling self actualization is 0.
Speaker:You know, nobody's going to
Speaker:stumble across this thing.
Speaker:They're going to come, I don't
Speaker:know, going to see something else like testosterone.
Speaker:I'm going to say, well, who the hell is this guy?
Speaker:And then I'm going to look it up and they're going to see some of
Speaker:my, you know, my personal, my relationship history and things
Speaker:like that. And it's all oriented along this
Speaker:idea of working.
Speaker:Plenty of people are doing the
Speaker:bottom of the pyramid.
Speaker:You know my friend Ryan Stone?
Speaker:He'll help you get laid.
Speaker:He's working at the bottom of the
Speaker:pyramid, dating coach, pickup artist, whatever the literature is
Speaker:out there.
Speaker:Plenty of people.
Speaker:Who about you don't need me for that.
Speaker:I'm working at the top end.
Speaker:The only way to work at the top is
Speaker:to work on yourself.
Speaker:And so how would you say like, I
Speaker:mean I know we actually don't have that much time left, so I just
Speaker:want to maybe let's finish it with one more question.
Speaker:And just not I know you need to go soon.
Speaker:So the question is this podcast is called we are already free.
Speaker:And so using your lens as an engineer, as a self actual
Speaker:engineer at this point who's helping people to find meaning and
Speaker:move higher.
Speaker:Up that pyramid where actually
Speaker:realizing that if I have meaning in my life, then I can put up with
Speaker:less comfort and I can actually celebrate less comfort and less of
Speaker:the things I thought I needed before I could do anything else.
Speaker:But because I have meaning, so when?
Speaker:Through the lens of we are already free, how would you invite someone
Speaker:using these last few minutes to step into that journey of self
Speaker:actual being a self actual engineer of their own
Speaker:transformation so that they can basically remember that foundation
Speaker:that we are actually already free and we do have a choice no matter
Speaker:what the outside world looks like.
Speaker:How would you approach that?
Speaker:So here's my first reaction your podcast is we are already free.
Speaker:And my first reaction is no, you're not.
Speaker:You have this aspirational title, and we think we have one idea of
Speaker:what freedom is.
Speaker:Wasn't free.
Speaker:So I'm you know, when I say, no, you're not.
Speaker:I'm not trying to be a Dick.
Speaker:I'm really just projecting my own
Speaker:experience. I thought I was free, not tenured
Speaker:professor. What could be more free?
Speaker:And the answer is the cages are all up in here.
Speaker:There was a time when I wrote an article why?
Speaker:I have obsessive thoughts.
Speaker:If I'm free, then why do I have
Speaker:all these thoughts that I don't want?
Speaker:Now I turned out.
Speaker:Later I read a book by Daniel.
Speaker:Aman called.
Speaker:Change your brain, change your
Speaker:life. He calls them automatic negative
Speaker:thoughts. And it's true.
Speaker:There are things that I couldn't do.
Speaker:And one of them was control.
Speaker:My own thoughts.
Speaker:What a.
Speaker:I thought I was in charge up here,
Speaker:and it turns out not.
Speaker:What's really in charge is a whole
Speaker:bunch of unresolved trauma, a whole bunch of things that
Speaker:happened to me that weren't my fault, but they happened to me.
Speaker:And as it turns out, I am hardwired because I am a mammal to
Speaker:seek out resolution of my trauma by reliving it from a position of
Speaker:control. I had no idea.
Speaker:I had no idea until I'd read Harville Hendrix and his amago
Speaker:theory. That's really good.
Speaker:I read Peter Levine, unspoken voice, waking the tiger.
Speaker:I read Bessel van der Kolk.
Speaker:The body keeps the score.
Speaker:I read Pete Walker.
Speaker:Complex PTSD, I read.
Speaker:Alice, her name escapes me, reading a lot on trauma.
Speaker:And it was.
Speaker:Quest I was trying to understand a
Speaker:woman that I was dating, and I was trying to understand myself, and I
Speaker:was trying to understand why my marriage and my relationships
Speaker:weren't working out the way I wanted them to work out.
Speaker:And I was trying to understand why.
Speaker:I felt and thought and saw things that why was I experiencing life
Speaker:the way that I was experiencing it?
Speaker:And I got, I mean, writing is great therapy because language is
Speaker:a technology for improving the quality of your thoughts.
Speaker:And until you put it down in writing, sometimes you don't even
Speaker:know what it is.
Speaker:And then you read it like, well,
Speaker:that's not quite right.
Speaker:And then you revise it and it
Speaker:becomes a much better story, turns out.
Speaker:That reliving your trauma from a position of control can happen in
Speaker:your imagination. It can happen in an
Speaker:improvisational theater sketch, and vanderkolk's got a whole
Speaker:chapter on it can happen.
Speaker:There's something the kids do when
Speaker:they play.
Speaker:It's called a do over.
Speaker:So you're on the playground and you know you have rules and you're
Speaker:playing a sport and there's some dispute.
Speaker:You were out of bounds.
Speaker:No, I wasn't.
Speaker:Yes, you were.
Speaker:I saw your foot, you know, and
Speaker:there's no, nobody's having any fun anymore cause you just
Speaker:arguing. And so somebody will say, let's
Speaker:have a do over and you just play it again and everybody agrees that
Speaker:whatever the outcome is, that's fair.
Speaker:And then you move on and you have fun again well.
Speaker:If my relationship sometimes now we'll get into, you know this, and
Speaker:then we start arguing about the argument, I don't even know what
Speaker:we're arguing about.
Speaker:And I say, can we have a do over?
Speaker:And she's learned enough to say, OK, and whatever the conversation
Speaker:was, it sounds childish, because it is.
Speaker:I'll say, OK, I'm gonna say this and you say this, but now I'm
Speaker:gonna say this instead.
Speaker:Nathan, it's amazing because it
Speaker:erases the old experience.
Speaker:Whatever the old argument was, we
Speaker:come to this agreement that nobody's gonna argue about whether
Speaker:your foot was out of bounds anymore.
Speaker:And whatever I said, I take it back, you know, which is another
Speaker:thing that I like 9 year olds can do that grown-ups stopped doing.
Speaker:So we do a do over and we get a much more satisfying resolution of
Speaker:the conversation, and that's the one that counts.
Speaker:When you do that, the trauma is resolved because you now believe
Speaker:that you're in control and when I faced this situation again, when I
Speaker:face abandonment again, when I face bullying again, when I face
Speaker:whatever it was and what will traumatize a four year old will
Speaker:not traumatize a 14 year old? Don't judge yourself for the
Speaker:traumas that you carried from, you know, when you were a defenseless
Speaker:child and think, if only I'd been tougher because you weren't.
Speaker:If it if we were 14 in that movie, never would have scared you.
Speaker:But at 4, you know, it could be trauma.
Speaker:For me, it was the Wizard of Oz.
Speaker:I had to figure that one out.
Speaker:But here I am now, when you are convinced that you can handle it,
Speaker:when you've mastered it because you've replayed it from a position
Speaker:of control, it doesn't come up anymore.
Speaker:You still have the memories, but you no longer have the emotions
Speaker:that are associated with the memories.
Speaker:Now you're free because your thoughts are your own.
Speaker:Your feelings are your own.
Speaker:And so for me, it was.
Speaker:A series of identifying and dismantling trauma I didn't even
Speaker:understand. And here's the bitch of it.
Speaker:Some of it wasn't even mine.
Speaker:It turns out that there's
Speaker:something called epigenetic intergenerational transfer of
Speaker:trauma. And to condense all that down from
Speaker:a, you know, Science Journal, where it means you inherited this
Speaker:trauma from your parents or your grandparents.
Speaker:And there's some really good case studies.
Speaker:So I went on ancestry.com to try and understand my ancestors
Speaker:a little bit better.
Speaker:Turns out my grandfather, for whom
Speaker:I am named Thomas.
Speaker:He was eight years old when his
Speaker:father died. What kind of trauma do you think
Speaker:my grandfather Thomas is going to be carrying around?
Speaker:Do you think maybe it could be abandonment?
Speaker:And like.
Speaker:I wasn't abandoned when, you know,
Speaker:not really.
Speaker:What the hell is going on?
Speaker:Why did I marry a woman? Who could not possibly live by
Speaker:herself? Why did I choose an alcoholic?
Speaker:Because she could never leave me.
Speaker:You know who's gonna hold her hair
Speaker:back while she's vomiting into the toilet?
Speaker:You know she can't get a job she.
Speaker:Problem solved.
Speaker:I can't be abandoned now, but whose trauma am I working on here?
Speaker:God, it wasn't even mine.
Speaker:And that sounds so foofoo like
Speaker:voodoo doll astrology out there that I had to get into the journal
Speaker:articles. And sure enough.
Speaker:There's a lot of good stuff on Holocaust victims.
Speaker:There's great case study in this book called it didn't start with
Speaker:you and it was a Cambodian American child.
Speaker:His parents were born in Cambodia.
Speaker:They'd lost relatives in the
Speaker:killing fields when the Camere Rouge came.
Speaker:They came to the United States.
Speaker:They escaped.
Speaker:They didn't want their child to have anything they didn't even
Speaker:want them to know.
Speaker:But his body knew, because when
Speaker:we're traumatized, the DNA, the DNA itself is not modified, but
Speaker:expression of the DNA is modified at a chemical level that's either
Speaker:methylated or it's coded in some other way so that some genes are
Speaker:upregulated and other genes are suppressed.
Speaker:Those genes can be passed on.
Speaker:There's some really good
Speaker:experiments with rats.
Speaker:7 generations of trauma can be
Speaker:carried in expression of the gene.
Speaker:So the child.
Speaker:The Cambodian American child.
Speaker:Yeah, I don't know how to say
Speaker:except it was all messed up.
Speaker:He was having fantasies.
Speaker:His play was violent, the parents didn't understand.
Speaker:The therapist was able to identify the examples of trauma that have
Speaker:been passed down to him epigenetically, and resolve them
Speaker:with a different story storytelling it takes place in our
Speaker:imagination, and the cells of your body don't know the difference
Speaker:between imagination and reality.
Speaker:They have no choice.
Speaker:They're responding to what? The brain.
Speaker:Is telling them to the respond to.
Speaker:So the story that you tell
Speaker:yourself is much more important than the experience that you had.
Speaker:It's how do you make meaning of that story?
Speaker:There's Frankel again, and how do all the cells in your body respond
Speaker:to the chemistry and the nervous system, the electrical impulses
Speaker:that are coming out of your imagination and telling them what
Speaker:to do? So they created 2 rituals for
Speaker:their child. One was at the Buddhist pagoda.
Speaker:I'm getting that wrong, but I can't remember there was one with
Speaker:a spiritual religious upon.
Speaker:And the other was.
Speaker:They put a picture of his grandfather, who was murdered by
Speaker:the Rouge, over his bed.
Speaker:And they told him now whose
Speaker:grandfather was, and in the way that you would explain it to a
Speaker:child, how he died.
Speaker:I said your grandfather loves you.
Speaker:He's watching over you.
Speaker:Kid, he used to play with this
Speaker:coat hanger. He would pretend it was a weapon
Speaker:and he would stab the couch cushions.
Speaker:You know, he would say die, die, die.
Speaker:He's five.
Speaker:It's not like he watched Star Wars
Speaker:and, you know, this is some violent video.
Speaker:Like, where did he get this from? Two weeks later, he gave the coat
Speaker:hanger back to his mother.
Speaker:He said, I don't need this
Speaker:anymore. Because his grandfather is
Speaker:watching over him so you can understand.
Speaker:It's powerful for me.
Speaker:Yeah, man.
Speaker:Nobody's like this is a story.
Speaker:It's in my head.
Speaker:Who's watching over Thomas, my grandfather.
Speaker:Is he watching over me or is it my turn?
Speaker:To watch over him.
Speaker:I've got it sorted out.
Speaker:That's where I hear.
Speaker:Am I free?
Speaker:Like you're already free? I'm not there yet, Nathan.
Speaker:I'm still working on it, you know.
Speaker:I hear you, Thomas.
Speaker:So thank you so much for that story.
Speaker:I mean, to me, we are already free is really like a mantra.
Speaker:It's the invitation, it's the reminder that at some level the
Speaker:level that is the level of energy flowing in and out of reality,
Speaker:that at that level we are truly all already free.
Speaker:And the beauty of this work and the reason I love doing this
Speaker:podcast is because these kind of conversations, it helps us to find
Speaker:the places where we aren't free so that we can return.
Speaker:And that story you've just told me is like.
Speaker:I don't even have the words for it.
Speaker:It's so heartbreaking and so beautiful to be learning these
Speaker:medicines that we can be free, we can heal by retelling our stories,
Speaker:by meeting our ancestors in new and different ways and by doing
Speaker:the healing that they never had the chance to do.
Speaker:And so I just really honor you for that and for sharing and for your
Speaker:vulnerability. And really, thank you again.
Speaker:I wanna bring this to a close because I know you gotta go.
Speaker:But thank you so much for this.
Speaker:Opportunity to sit with you and to
Speaker:hear your story and I feel like we've only just it was like an
Speaker:introduction. So let's do this again so we can
Speaker:do it again and it'll be alright.
Speaker:Thank you, Nathan.
Speaker:It's been a pleasure meeting.
Speaker:You thank you.
Speaker:And I'll share all links to you and everything in the shower, so
Speaker:don't worry about that.
Speaker:I'll share that with everyone.
Speaker:And yeah, I'll definitely direct everyone to your page, but I know
Speaker:you gotta go.
Speaker:So thanks again and blessings on
Speaker:the path. I look forward to connecting again
Speaker:soon. It's been a pleasure.
Speaker:I'll talk to you soon.
Speaker:Thank you again, Thomas P Seger at
Speaker:the end there.
Speaker:Your vulnerability.
Speaker:You really just broke my heart wide open and I am so grateful.
Speaker:This is why I love these kind of conversations, like just getting
Speaker:to be real together.
Speaker:Share our pain, share our joy,
Speaker:share our passion, the things we really care about.
Speaker:So to you listening, I hope that this brought you value this story
Speaker:of 1 Man's journey, of losing himself, finding himself.
Speaker:And as that journey continues, discovering, rediscovering
Speaker:everyday what it means to be human, to show up in the world.
Speaker:And I certainly love his morasco cold forged.
Speaker:And they're helping lots of people around the world with their ice
Speaker:cold bars. Ice plunges and, you know, just
Speaker:really good to hear such a human story.
Speaker:It fills my heart.
Speaker:You can find links to Thomas's
Speaker:blog, which I do really recommend.
Speaker:He writes beautifully about all
Speaker:things kind of health called immersion related, if that's
Speaker:anything that you're into.
Speaker:Also writes about generational
Speaker:trauma and how we can work with that.
Speaker:So again, that's linked, in the show notes, which you can find on
Speaker:whatever app you're currently listening to.
Speaker:Or just go to already.
Speaker:Free dot me forward slash zero
Speaker:zero seven double oh.
Speaker:Seven good.
Speaker:Episode and yeah, if you're feeling a call after listening to
Speaker:that, if you've.
Speaker:Kind of want to make some changes
Speaker:in your life and you wanna get started.
Speaker:I really recommend starting small.
Speaker:Just small.
Speaker:Consistent action is really one of the most powerful things that you
Speaker:can do. I know my own tendency is to go
Speaker:all in where it's just like I'm now going to do.
Speaker:I'm now going to do 3 hours of morning routine and morning
Speaker:practice or an hour of breathwork or whatever it is.
Speaker:But really, if you can just start with five minutes of either
Speaker:breathwork or meditation or journaling, just do that every day
Speaker:and commit to that and make that your.
Speaker:One commitment.
Speaker:Even if nothing else happens,
Speaker:start there and grow on build on that.
Speaker:I promise you, the person you are in a year will be so grateful for
Speaker:whatever small actions you consistently take day by day.
Speaker:As always, if you enjoy this podcast, please leave a review on
Speaker:Apple Podcasts or a star rating on Spotify, or share it from
Speaker:whichever app you listen on.
Speaker:You can just go to already free
Speaker:dot me forward slash review.
Speaker:If you do want to leave a review.
Speaker:It makes a huge difference not only to the algorithm of.
Speaker:These platforms that helps to be seen by more people, but it also
Speaker:makes a difference in my heart because it lets me know that
Speaker:you're out there and that you're listening and that you're what the
Speaker:value is that you're receiving it just gets me so such a juiced up
Speaker:like really beautiful abundant feeling of connection with you.
Speaker:So until next week, I wish you all the blessings on your path.
Speaker:And please know that you can always reach out to me via voice
Speaker:note on either Telegram or Instagram.
Speaker:Just go to already free dot me forward slash 007 And you will
Speaker:find links to both of those platforms there.
Speaker:Just leave me a voice note.
Speaker:Would love to hear from you.
Speaker:I'd love to share your voice note on this podcast in a future
Speaker:episode. And yeah, I love being me with
Speaker:you. Thank you.
Speaker:I'll see you next week.
Speaker:And until then, remember we are.
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