John Beede - Cultivating Resiliency, Rites of Passage, and Shifting Your Finish Line

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Welcome to the Man Talk show. Training for men, answers for women. I am Connor Beaton and joining me today is John Beatty. Now, John Beatty has climbed, wait for it. To the top of the tallest mountain on every continent, including Mount Everest. During the nine year adventure, he somehow survived avalanches, pulmonary edemia, tribal warfare, and a whole lot of cliff bars. He's a worldwide adventurer who has traveled to 65 countries, written three books, and given live presentations to nearly 1 million live teens and middle school audience members. His new book called the Warrior eight Quests for Boys to Grow Up With Kindness, Courage and Grit is out soon. And so we're going to talk about a few things. One of the main pieces that I wanted to talk to John about was the idea of resiliency, what that means, because clearly you have to have a bit of resiliency to climb the tallest mountain on every single continent. So we talk a little bit about his adventures. He recants some stories of being on these missions, what he learned about becoming resilient and infusing compassion with that. And then we talk about the age of what boys are going through in today's culture and how we can create initiatory experiences for young men. And so I've had a lot of people reaching out about resources for their young boys, single mothers and parents and fathers asking like, what do I need to do? How do I support my son? What does it look like? And so we're going to dive into that towards the latter half of this podcast. So this is chock full of some great resources. Don't forget to take some notes. Without any further delay, please welcome Mr. John Beatty.

Connor. Thanks so much for having me on. Excited to chat with you.

Yeah, same. I am very much looking forward to hearing some of your stories after doing a little bit of background research on you and watching a couple of your talks and just learning a little bit about your adventures, it seems like. Seems like you have.

Just some lessons to teach all of us about the adventure within. And we're going to talk a little bit about the Warrior Challenge, which I think is going to resonate a lot for maybe some of the parents out there or just people in general. So before we dig into that, tell us a story about a defining moment in your life that made you who you are today.

Thanks for that great welcome. I went to South America in 2008 with the intention of climbing the tallest mountain there. It's called Aconcagua. It means White Sentinel. And it's a 16 day journey that starts in the desert and Gets higher and higher to 23,000 almost feet above sea level, which is, you know, the tallest mountain in north in contiguous US is 14,500ft, Mount Whitney. So we're going well over a mile higher than Mount Whitney. I get to base camp, which is at 14,000ft, and my lungs start having issues. There's something that can happen in climbing called pulmonary edema. It's where your lungs fill up with fluid and you can just drown on the side of a mountain. My teammates say we only have so much time. We only have so much food, we only have so much fuel. Stay here, we're going ahead. They go ahead. And after about four days, my lungs start recovering. Yeah, I'm strong enough to go ahead. And there's a medic there, gives me the A, okay, climb up higher, catch up to them, and we get up to the high camp. So it's one final push one day before summiting. And I see this cloud. It's a lenticular cloud above the mountain. And from everything I'd researched, everything I knew about mountaineering, that's bad. That means massive storm coming in. And I see this team at about 2 in the morning. They wake me up and I see their headlamps flashing across the tents. You know, it's like we start, we climb through the night, so it's just black out. You got these stars everywhere. I stick my head out of the tent and I say, guys, I don't think that this is the right time to climb. And they're like, well, we're going for it. So. And I was the last person to see them alive because the storm came and overtook them. Those two moments of my team going off without me was defining for me in a moment of finding my own self sufficiency and then seeing that storm cloud and deciding not to go, I guess I kind of left that part out. I went down and saw them go up, say I'm also going to buck the trend and kind of think differently than what the group of people is doing in order to do what I need to do. For me, those were defining moments for everything that came next. And also those deaths, they had a big impact on my mental health. And so sorting through that was, in the end, good. But it was harrowing when I was trying to figure out, like, what does this mean?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've, I've spoken with a few people that have, you know, climbed Everest or K2 or I mean, countless other mountains and had some of their climbing partners not make it through and some very Interesting stories. And so I'm curious for you because that's. That's a big thing that a lot of us, a lot of people deal with is the grief of loss. And I think specifically around sometimes survivor's guilt can be present. And so how did you manage that afterwards, coming back down the mountain and eventually realizing that some of these people that you knew were not coming back? How did you start to face that? Because that's a challenging thing to deal with.

I managed it poorly and I faced it terribly. Okay.

I appreciate the honesty. It fucking sucked at first.

Yeah. I'm glad we can say that. It was atrocious. It fucking sucked. And the kind of key lesson that I also want to point out is you don't have to climb a mountain and see something like that in order to feel that. I think every guy, every man experiences some sort of wake up smack. Maybe it's a divorce or a breakup, Maybe it's getting fired from your job. Maybe you've seen something horrible happen. If you're in the medical profession or a doctor, police officer, if you've been in a protest or any of these things. Like, all guys at some point in their life face something that shakes them to their core. In all my discussions with, like, the gnarliest of gnarly men dude in the world and climbing all these mountains I've seen, and this is why it sucked for me, is I did all three of these things also, I think that guys, when we're faced with pain, we try and tough it out and pretend that that pain isn't there. We try and nice it out and just be this Persona that we think other people are going to like. And then we distract from what's actually going on or we numb it out. And for me, that was drinking too much alcohol at times. For other people, everybody can kind of, like lean into their own way or method of numbing. Whether it's food or pills.

Drugs or alcohol, we all find something that's like, that's how I get rid of the pain. All of those don't work. And that's what I mean specifically when I say, like, I dealt with it poorly.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's. It's interesting because we have in some ways, like, surgically removed grief from our modern culture. You know, like, grief is something that we largely hide behind the scenes. And so when we. When we've lost something or we feel like we failed in a. In a sort of epic way, that's generally the thing that we try and hide the Most. Right. Shame and grief. I find it's just so fascinating that in our hyper connected culture, we have largely extracted that from visibility, from people's sight lines. When in older cultures and tribal cultures, when people were grieving, they did it as a unit. Your grief was witnessed by other people, and it was something that was sacred.

Like, pre. In BC era, it was ripping your clothes off. Right. You would tear your clothes off in grief. Like, it was that visible and animated and your body would express that pain. Now it's like, oh, go off on your own and if you got to cry and don't let anybody see it.

Yeah. So, okay, so you didn't deal with it well at first.

There is an upside to this story that is not the end of the show.

Yeah.

So I took this, like, poor message and these poor ways of handling it into all these other mountains until I get to Mount Everest and I see a guy up close and personal who's frozen into the ice. He's on his last breath. And that kind of hit a tipping point where it created post traumatic stress disorder. So it forced me into therapy. It was like, I can't function as a guy right now with this continual message. And I knew that something, like, had to change, and that was, like, my last option. So after unraveling all these messages, I was, like, shocked when the psychologist told me, you don't qualify for these symptoms any longer. You know, I'd been in like a year and a half of therapy, and I thought, like, oh, this is just something you have for your entire life. All these misconceptions like, oh, you have to be in the military to get it, or. And now it's like a very conflated term with, like, I stubbed my toe. I have PTSD whenever I get around a bedpost. Like, no, that's not what it is. Like, there's a lot of education that needs to happen there. But through all this, like, vulnerable work, this saying, here's what's real, here's what's honest, here's what, like, happened in my past and who I want to show up as today. Here are the values I want to live by basically defining myself. That's what led to the healing, and that's what cleared those symptoms. And now I have a happy, fun, adventurous life that I'm grateful for, that whole process.

Yeah, I appreciate you bringing that up because I think that a lot of men have some, maybe not ptsd, but certainly I talk a lot about trauma on the show, depending on who I have on the show. But I also work with a lot of men who have experienced some form of trauma. Maybe not capital T trauma, like what you're talking about, but maybe a small T trauma. Right. So emotional abuses or some minor physical abuses as a kid. And I'm always surprised at how, again, how little.

Literature and education that we have about things like trauma, informed response, and how our body, our mind, our psychology, adapts to things like trauma and then produces these automatic responses that start to fill in our behavioral patterns and allow us to sort of cope with this trauma that's residing within our body and within our mind and within our emotions. And so what were some of those things that you found to be supportive for you and generative for you as you went through this process? And then I'm going to go back to the beginning a little bit here, because I feel like we're going down the trauma.

Right rabbit hole, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like, super straight in all of a sudden. So I hope you don't mind that. But what were some of the things that you found generative for yourself? Because I. I think, you know, a lot of people listening to this podcast, maybe it's not a severe thing like what you're dealing with, but I think that a lot of people right now are dealing with minor forms of trauma.

Right?

Like, they've lost jobs, they've lost people. I mean, I know. I know many people who have had children during COVID and they haven't been able to have their parents come and visit their kids, and they've been isolated with their child. They haven't been able to see anybody else. People that have lost parents and not been able to have a burial for them. I mean, there's a lot of these instances where people are struggling and not knowing how to sort of cope with these traumatic or very challenging events. And I know those are different from what you experienced. So I also want to honor that. But I think that there's value in just having a conversation around how you started to face that and work through it.

Well, so I'm going to answer in a few different ways, as succinctly as I can. The first one is that we all compare our pain to somebody else's that we think is more than ours. And then we discount the idea that we could have to deal with something. Like, I started researching about emotional traumas, and I found this article about the first responder who came into the Sandy Hook classroom and found all those children murdered. And I'm like, I can't have emotional trauma. That's emotional trauma. I don't deserve to feel bad. That guy, like, so if somebody's out there hurting and you haven't had some death, like, close up to you or something really, like capital T trauma, still, you've got something that, like, should be handled and dealt with. So to the first part of your question, then what worked for me? It started with these tiny baby admissions of pain exists. My whole mantra climbing mountains was, there is no pain. I'm going to take every single step. I'm going to destroy my knees, destroy my hips, destroy my back just to get to the top. Like, pain doesn't exist for me. So just to tell people I think I'm having a rough time right now, that's how it would start. And then it was like, okay, I'm going to go in to talk to this therapist. And that was a huge decision. Just to even go sit down. And it progressed like that to now we have this conversation, and I'm not, like, falling apart by any means when I'm, like, telling you that these things happen, you know, because it's like I've gone through this process, just these tiny baby steps of, like, yep, I think I might need to, like, talk to somebody. Just that tiny little admission snowballed to a point where it's like, hey, this doesn't hurt anymore. Because I've shared it with people who care, and I saw that they care, and they gave me the tools. And then one of the tools is meditation. That was a huge one. Feeling out my body. I mean, you talked about, like, trauma response, being locked into the body, recognizing where that is, and just observing and breathing and watching my breath. That was massively healing.

Yeah, it's. I mean, it's so funny because a lot of the. A lot of the questions that I get from men is like, hey, I'm dealing with anxiety, or, hey, I'm dealing with performance anxiety in the bedroom. Or, you know, these types of questions are like, what do I do? And I'm like, you need to learn how to work with your breath, because your breath is the access point. You're the bridge to your nervous system. And it's like, not, no, no, no. But like, what can I actually do? It's like.

It's like.

Like, I don't. I don't want to sit and meditate.

Come on, give me the good stuff. Give me the good stuff.

And then, like, just tell me the. Tell me the sentence that I need to repeat to myself every morning. Or, like, give me something different. I don't want to sit still and breathe. I want to do something different. It's like, no, this is actually the access point. So. Okay, I'm curious for you. What do you feel like these, this, this specific experience initiated you into and what did it initiate you away from? Because I think one of the things that these types of experiences produce for us is a kind of initiation. Right. And I think that oftentimes people view initiation as like.

Something that's going to improve you. Right? Initiation is like a self improvement tool, when in reality, initiation is more of like a preparing us to be of greater contribution. In some ways, at least that's how I've witnessed and experienced it. And so I'm curious for you, how did this experience initiate you both away from something and towards something?

I had this huge idea that I was going to be this megastar Everest climber and climb the seven summits, and people would do this huge celebration. And once all these traumas started happening, it was like, this stuff doesn't even matter. And I would see the mountaintop and my mind would say, this is just like by the last few, this is just a cold, icy rock in the middle of nowhere. My family's not around, my friends aren't around. I might spend like a week with these other dudes who are on my expedition team. But I really questioned, like, what does this all mean and matter? So it shifted me away from this, like, pursue glory mindset. And through this work, it made me more aware of how common.

The current male experience really is with maybe in a different story or a different degree, but of this idea of like, we tough it out, we nice it out, and we numb it out. And that was what eventually was when this book deal came to me and they said, hey, we're looking for a book for guys. We think you might be a guy to write it. I was like, it's gonna be, it's gonna cover these things. I'm gonna go deep into it. And I think that's. So that's what, that's what caused the shift did was like, I'm not alone in this. And other guys go through the same thing. I'm not some unique snowflake that like, has my own story that should be celebrated. It's like, we're all in this together.

I love that.

I'm also currently in the process of writing a book. And I wrote a line in there just recently that we've been indoctrinated into a cult. And it's the cult of specialness that we are all just so eager to find our unique.

Snowflakeness. I love that you use that word. It's such a triggering word in our common system. Currents and starts like, oh, you're snowflake.

Well, I was saying it about myself like I used to.

It's perfect. It's perfect. It's. It's great. So I am curious to get a little bit of insight into, like, what drove you to do this? Because, like, you climbed to the top of the tallest mountain on every continent. And for me, at no point in my life have I ever thought that that is something that I want to go and do. And I love hiking. I really, truly do. And so help me help the listener understand, like, where did this come from? How did you wake up? And, like, is it something that you always wanted to do? Was it something that you were trying to prove? Like, help us understand the drive behind this?

Yeah. We often say in the mountains, like, you either get it or you don't. You either have that thing that makes you want to climb these mountains, or we talk about friends and family. They're like, you're crazy. Like, it's either people who think that's crazy cool or that's just plain crazy to do that. So I've narrowed it down for me to three things, and I've thought about this a lot as I've taken these slow, agonizing steps to the middle of nowhere in the sky. And the first one is the cool answer, and that is, I felt like there was something bigger in me, and I didn't have a measuring stick because we don't have Rites of Passages in our society. So I didn't have a standard to say. Here's the tape measure. Here's how much of a man you are, really. So I was like, well, mountains could be the measuring stick. They could give me an altitude footage, like, meterage, like, height of, here's how big of a guy you are now that, like I said, I kind of dropped that front, because then I started to realize I was going out on this. I was learning the basic steps of meditation. I would take a step. I could not physically take another step until I learned to control my breath. So I'm like. I could feel this line of energy come up my leg, and once it reached my hip. Okay, ready for another step? I take that step and then breathe two, three full breaths before I'm ready to take another step. Like on Everest, you're a third of the oxygen level that you and I are breathing right now. So you have to learn how, like, you're panicked. There's a 8,000 foot drop on one side, 10,000 foot drop on the other. And you got to stay calm and move at that pace as you like. Any exposed skin is going to be frozen within one minute. So you've got to manage all these things and be totally at peace for hours in those conditions. So it was moving meditation. It was like my yoga really. And then the third thing that drew me to the mountains was somewhere in that balancing line of like life and death and the most beautiful landscapes I've ever seen. And that camaraderie is where I found my own version of God. I think that the mountains are my cathedrals. I've never fit in at churches or any religious organizations. But when I go into the wilderness and I see these things that make me feel small, I'm like, suddenly my soul feels big.

Yeah, I get that. I get that. I think I've said on the show a few times, like being in the forest is my church. Sitting underneath a waterfall and getting pelted by freezing cold or getting into glacial.

Water, little Wim Hof style.

Yeah. Getting into the breath is just like. That's the aliveness. There's a connection there. And so talk a little bit more about. You sort of mentioned that we as men don't really have these initiation or I can't remember the word that you just used there because I'm.

Rites of passages.

Yeah, the rites of passage. Right. And I think this is such an interesting concept and this ties into your book, which I want to talk about here in a second because I have a lot of people reaching out constantly about parenting advice for young boys. In a modern culture where young men don't have rights of passage anymore. Even a lot of the institutions that used to be there, like boy Scouts are starting to be stripped down and broken apart and those institutions are no longer there.

There is a sacredness to these rites of passage and they play a very important role. And so maybe tell me a little bit about how you define from your perspective a rites of passage and how climbing was that for you? A little bit. Because it sounds like it was totally.

I went from boyhood to manhood in that whole process. That was my self imposed rite of passage.

Ah, okay. Yeah. Because I think like I. I found that without my rights of passions, I started to seek it as a young man, As a young adolescent, I started to seek it. I bought at 191000 cc motorcycle.

And started street racing and started stunting and shit like that. It was just pushing the edge and Seeing how fast running from the cops and stuff like that. And so that for me was this uncontained rites of passage. And so where do you see young men struggling today? Because you've done a lot of public speaking at schools and for young men and women, young boys and girls around America, around the world, where do you see rites of passage sort of lacking? And what do we do? What's your perspective?

Let's go back and look at why they existed in the first place.

In current day Tanzania and Kenya, the Maasai tribes had their young men go out and hunt and kill a lion. If he couldn't do that, he was not a man of the warrior class. Then in Brazil they have a rite of passage where you have to, there's a bullet ant. It's the most painful sting that exists. And one single sting will paralyze you. You'll be vomiting, convulsing in pain. Many people pass out not just for a few minutes, for 24 hours, this pain goes on and puts you into hallucinations. They would not take one ant. They make a glove made of leaves, put the kid's hand into this glove and have the ant sting all over all those ants for five minutes. And they wouldn't just do this once. They do it like 12, 15 times before you're allowed to be a man. In Vanuatu, in the South Pacific islands, they tie vines to the boy's legs, they jump off out of the hundred foot tree and the closer the kid's head gets to the ground, the more of a man he is because he can face death. I could go on with these, but why did these exist? So back in those days, those were the greatest threats that those societies faced, right? Like if, if you, if you as a guy can't defend your tribe from that lion, what use are you? If you're in the Brazilian rainforest and you're scared of these ants running at you and you then let your baby get bit, what use are you? You don't deserve to be here. If you're like trying to hunt an animal up in a tree and you can't get to it and you fall because you're scared, you can't help the tribe, you're dead weight. So we got rid of those because we didn't need them anymore, right? Like lions aren't a threat to us in North America. So I believe we need to look at the things that say because guys have this energy. Just like you had the energy of like, I got to get on this motorcycle, I had this energy of I want to go to the highest points and it's like, why do we have this? I think it comes from the same thing of like, there's this energy that if we can harness it to defend our society from our greatest threats, that's the point of a rite of passage. So I wrote this book as a rite of passage to help young men for today learn the values that look after our society. Self awareness, learning how to watch your breath, like we were talking about earlier. Healthy boundaries, avoiding toxic relationships, equality for all human beings, grit and resilience. Like, these are the qualities that help you to defend your society today. So I wrote this book as that eight quest. Rite of passage.

Yeah, I think you just reminded me of a sort of concept that there's a depth psychologist named Francis Weller, I think I've referred to him on the show. But he talks about initiation quite a bit. And he talks about how initiation, proper initiation, is a contained.

Experience with death, right? Where we actually come face to face in some way with death. And that trauma is often an uncontained experience with death, right? And so.

When you witness these traumatic experiences, like being at war and seeing one of your friends get shot or blown up or whatever the case may be, it's an uncontained experience or interaction with death. And when I look back at a lot of the men that I've worked with who have been seeking this rites of passage, right? Like, you were on the mountain, I was on the mountain, on the motorcycle. We are in some ways trying to come into contact with this mystery, right? Of like, how far can I push myself? Right?

Where the border of death really is, what we end up looking for. And without a guide and a proper rite of passage, it just becomes dangerous, Right? But if there's a clear path of like, hey, here's what you need to look out for, here's where you push the line too far in a guide that helps a guy figure out what those limits are in a safe environment, which is what rite of passages were back then.

Then it just creates the dangerous scenario. So I want. I think that it's so important to bring this back, but in a way that's useful to us today.

Yeah, yeah. Because a lot of. I think a lot of young men are still seeking it, but they just don't have outlets for it. You know, they don't have men that are talking about this. They don't have experiences that are. That are contained, right. That are structured in a way where somebody's going to be there to guide them, to answer Their questions to say, like, not freaking out right now is normal. You know, it's okay.

Like, push yourself. Like, hey, it hurts, but watch your breath to remind you, hey, like, the Mandan boys would have their finger chopped off and then the guide would chop it off and then say, okay, it hurts. Feel that pain. And watch your breath and like, hold your finger in your other hand. We don't need to do that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just for reference. Yeah.

Just for point of clarification, but I think that parents can be that to young men today. Like, I can't be that. But you could take your kid on their own rite of passage and you could guide them in the values that your family has. Or if you're an educator that your students have, you can give rites of passages equally today. And that's. Yeah, I lay out that formula in the book.

And why, from your experience, do you feel this is so important? Because I can kind of hear some of my listeners and just people in the social media sphere hearing this conversation and saying, like, well, why the hell do we need that? Why is that relevant? Why do young men still require this? And so I have my.

Because there's a MeToo movement that happened because there's man boys everywhere, because people complain about what dicks guys are. And that happens because we have this energy that has to go somewhere. And if it's not guided, then it turns either inward. You've got 78% of teen suicides are males. You've got sex offenders are males. You've got school shooters, males. Because they have this energy and it's not directed and guided. So if you're thinking, like, why do we need this thing? Look around. Sorry, I got a little like, oh, get it.

I got into it.

I was feeling it.

Yeah, no, it's. I, I would agree 100%. I think largely what we are seeing in, in our society, this sort of like bifurcation that's happening amongst young men is that a lot of them do not have any rites of passage. And their, their. I call it the dangerous man or the predator or whatever you want to talk, however you want to label it. The shadow aspect of our psyche is a big part of what I usually talk about on the show. That part of us is wanting to be worked with in some way. And if we don't teach ourselves as young men how to work with will either lead us down a path of some form of self destruction, or as Jung talked about, it'll actually consume our ego and we'll basically just become sort of avatars that are fulfilling the shadows or.

The shadows goals. Right. And aims. And I think that's what we see a lot of in today's world. And so walk us through a little bit of the book. So the Warrior challenge is the name of the book. Eight quests for boys to grow up with kindness, Courage and grit. Where do you start? I think you talk about training. Phase number one, weapons mastery. Talk to us a little bit about that. Where do you begin in this conversation with young men?

Yeah, thanks. So we're having this very adult conversation right now. Right. This would be way over the head of a tween, like an 11 year old if they were to try and grasp what we're talking about. So I wrote this in the form of a video game where you enter as a young man that a Maasai warrior is holding a spear up to your face and he's saying like, you're going to hunt a lion. And then we, like, at the moment he goes off on the lion hunt, we pause and we break down what that lesson was. Step up as a man. Like, you got to make a choice in our society, seeing our dangers, what are you going to do? Are you going to step up or are you going to let culture decide who you'll end up being? Then we go into the next chapter, the second quest. And that's you're in the shoes of Danny Way, a professional skateboarder who jumped over the Great Wall of China on a fractured ankle. And he stuck the 360, stuck the landing and he went again and again and again. And I teach self awareness from that because he would see my ankle's broken, but this is a million dollar ramp built for me. Like cool stuff that kids are like, oh my gosh, this is awesome. And you are Danny Way in this story. And we break it down and say, okay, here's how to watch your breath. Then we go into values. Your Baja 1000 off road racer driving through Mexico, dirt flying everywhere. And then this guy, Dennis Hollenbeck lost the race, but he ended up winning more publicity and attention for his battered women's and children's shelter as a result of the attention that was drawn to him losing. So this is about like, how do you shift your finish line from what society tells you should be your goal or your values and put it on like what you choose to be the standard of your success? Like it's not the checkered flag finish, it's what you decide to be the success line for yourself, which is integrity and values and Your own what I call a warrior creed. So we go like this through these eight quests. Those are the first three. And we shift from, like you said, training phase one, that's weapons mastery, that's about yourself. Then we, then we shift to here's how to deal with others. So you go into.

Your communist escapee and your rock climbers climbing in the dawn wall in Yosemite. And these teach healthy boundary setting, how to choose good friends. Ernest Shackleton is about grit and resilience. And then you're a Civil War slave escaping on a pirate ship in order to teach equality and how to find your life purpose. So it's like you are the dude, you're the hero. Relating it in the language that kids, I think, eat up.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I feel like.

Back in the day, I remember having a Nintendo 64. I was a big James Bond Goldeneye fan.

I was going to say Goldeneye classic.

The bobblehead mod was the best. That was a good one. Right. And you'd have.

The Golden Pistols.

Right.

You had the Walter PPK7 and it was the golden one.

Oh, man, I still have the maps memorized. I want to go head to head with you right now.

I won a tournament, man, you better watch out. One tournament.

Back in my day, like, kids love video games and they just because there's some adventure that's happening, it's like that's a mini rite of passage. If you've got a bigger question challenge, it's written into the hearts of guys that this is what you got to do. So I'm like, if I'm going to teach these values, there has to be crazy engaging stories that kids are going to actually read the thing. Yeah.

And I think what I really love about what you're talking about specifically is that it re emphasizes the need for young boys to have quests and adventures. I think about my childhood and there was a lot of adventures. There's a lot of quests. I was constantly Boy Scouts camping, archery.

Same Eagle Scout here. Yep, yep. Right.

You know, riding around on my bicycle, like I just had so much energy. And so I guess I'm kind of. What I would love for you to address is one of the biggest questions that I get a lot is from single parents and they're sort of saying, hey, I have a young boy, I have a 12 year old, I have a teenager. What can I do to support him? What are some of the main pieces that I need? And I think what I hear you saying is let's reengage them in these rites of passage. Let's re engage them in developing quests for them to embark on. So is that true? What would you say to the single parents that are raising young boys and are like, I don't even know where to start. What do I do? Because I know that they're different from my daughter, but I'm not really too sure how to engage in this.

Yeah, I think that it's like, find the big challenge. And it doesn't have to be climb Mount Everest. It doesn't have to be stick your child's hand into a glove full of ants. As much as you may want to do that every once in a while, teaching from home all day as you're trying to work, and they're on zoom calls for education, but it's like finding that next step up that for the young man in your life feels like is maybe possible. Not quite sure if he could do it, but it would be really freaking cool if he could achieve that or if he was on top of the proverbial mountain looking back down saying, oh, my gosh, I did it.

There's some juice in that that guys just thrive on. Of like, I had no idea I was this strong. Maybe it's running a mile, maybe it's running five. Maybe it's a marathon. Maybe it's playing a sweet song on the guitar and you. You buy that, like, Guitar Hero game for him to figure it out. Because now it's like, not just buttons like it was for us. It's like actual strings now.

Yeah, we're doing ourselves Guitar Guitar Hero. Like a teenager listening to this, he's like, what the hell these guys talking about?

Or like.

But it's that next level up that you're not quite sure is possible. But if you could do that thing or if you did it, your confidence would boost. I think that's like the core of a rite of passage. So find that for the young man that's in your life. Have that open conversation of, like, what would be awesome? What would be so cool for you to do? And then foster it and build it.

Yeah, awesome. Awesome. And I think the other thing that I would just add in is don't be afraid to push them outside of their comfort zone. I think what I have seen a lot of in having worked with just so many men now is that the men that aren't challenged when they were boys, they didn't have that, again, that contained rites of passage or initiation. They really struggle later on in life because they haven't developed that Resiliency. They haven't developed that. That internal part of them that kind of gets a little. I want to be vulgar here, but I'm not going to be. But gets a little bit, like, excited about facing a challenge. You know, it's like, great, there's a challenge here. I'm excited to go to battle with that. I'm excited to engage with that in some way. And what I've seen a lot of is that young men that don't have that growing up that are given the participation awards and, and the trophies for coming in last and are never really, like, told like, hey, I actually think you can do more, you know, and are just given the pat on the back and said, like, you know, it's okay. Don't. Don't worry about it. I'm not saying that there's no time and place to encourage and comfort our boys, but to actually push them just a little bit. They often, later on in life really struggle to face hard challenges because they've never actually developed the resiliency and the internal willingness and excitement to face those challenges. So I'm curious if you, like, what's your take on that? Do you agree? Do you disagree? Have you seen that?

Just your take on that.

You phrased it in an angle that I hadn't quite put together so clearly, but I agree. Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. You said it better than I can right now, so nailed it.

All good. Tell me a little bit more about some of your adventures, because I am sitting here.

And my curiosity is so piqued about some of the stories of your experiences climbing, and I'm hoping that you can just share some of your highlights. What were some of the top moments for you where, you know, bring us to some of these places around the world that you climbed and what it was like in some of those experiences and teach us a little bit about resiliency and grit and how you actually started to cultivate that on the sides of these mountains.

One thing I get asked a lot is, like, what was the first time you climbed? Like, what was the first big mountain you went on? So I'll start there. And my buddy and I go to Wyoming because he says, hey, there's this mountain called the Grand Teton. And all I had done was climbed like 40 or 50 foot climbs as a part of Boy Scouts. And I'm like, oh, I teach rock climbing to these Boy Scouts. I can go climb this Grand Teton. It's just 30ft after 30ft after 30ft over and over. And over. So we're 22 and 21 years old, and we can't afford proper gear like cams and quick draws. There's just, like, the stuff that goes into the rock to keep you safe. But we do have a rope and harnesses. So our whole plan is we're gonna tie the rope between our harnesses and Simon climb together. Like, climb at the exact same time. And if one person falls, the other person's job is gonna be to jump over a rock. And then we just pendulum. And we, like, told ourselves, oh, yeah, that's totally safe. This is gonna work. Totally idiotic.

Like, just, this is the shit that we do. Yeah, this is the shit. This is so safe. So stupid.

Looking back at, like, the most dangerous possible method of climbing, and we get to the summit, we also couldn't afford a tent. This is something that a lot of people do in two nights, three days. They walk in, set up camp, climb the thing, sleep another night, and go back out. We're just like, well, we can't sleep. We can't buy a tent. So let's just do it all in one shot. So after, like, 19, 20 hours, we do this whole thing, round trip, get back exhausted. And I was like, that was the hardest I'd ever pushed myself in my life up to then. And what happened is I learned from the dumb stuff that we did. And I saw that, my gosh, I can, like, I push myself. And that was pretty cool that I, like, saw that I was made of more. And I was faced up against, like, you have to do this. You have to get back. I found inner strength. So I took that to the next. The mountains that followed. I went to Aconcagua, which I talked about earlier. I went to Denali up in North America and took a proper mountaineering course. I started to learn some of the, like, actual ways to keep myself safe in these big mountains. Mountains. And now we're talking, like, 15, 16, 17 days out in these mountains, just surviving on what's on your back and the sledge you're pulling behind you. The most beautiful climb I ever went on was not physically beautiful, but connective beautiful. It was with my dad. We went to Kilimanjaro together. It flipped. Who was the leader in that dynamic? In some ways, because I'm like, dad, you wear these socks today. Dad, here's how you tie your shoes so that they don't split apart because they kept coming undone. I'm like, here's how you tie the knot, and here's when you change Mitts and you're sweating too much into this shirt. So you gotta learn layering. And it was like this cool transition of him going from the guide to me, to me being the guide to him. And in some way I think that every guy, if he's lucky enough to have his father around, we'll see that and we'll go through that same thing. So that was a cool one. And then the last one was. The last big mountain I climbed was Mount Vincent in Antarctica. And just getting down there is like 50% of the adventure because you take airplanes that have no wheels, they have skis, you land on the snow and then like these cat tractors roll out of the back of this massive Ilyushin aircraft. It's a Russian airplane. There's only two of them in the world. There's like they used to not even have seats bolted in. They would just be shipping crates that they would bolt the chairs into. And then the crates weren't attached to anything. So if there's turbulence, the whole crate with the whole row of passengers is moving around in the airplane. And then to be left behind by that same plane after it drops you off and you're 1,000 miles from civilization and you see the airplane, propellers just kind of disappear off into the distance and you stop hearing them and it turns completely silent. And you know that you could be there for a month if there's a storm and the plane can't get back to you and you're like, do I have what it takes to be fully self sufficient? And it's the most beautiful place. The only colors are white the snow, black the rocks, and blue the sky. There were no other colors. And to be in that environment was just like so special. And to wrap it all off by standing on top of the bottom of the world, finishing the seven summits. I was filled with life. And it was also very clearing of like, my boyhood is gone. That's done. I'm now going to go be a man in the world.

Yeah, that's powerful. That's powerful. And I think that that is something that, without sort of being so bold or hopefully not to sound so arrogant, that I think that all men should strive for at some point in their life to have that clear demarcation.

Right.

And to not let it be something that necessarily just arrives, but it's something that they actively pursue. Right. That there's an intentionality to creating experiences where they can say, my boyhood is complete. I've moved through that part of myself that wants to go and do not that you don't want to still go do some crazy shit sometimes.

Oh, I'm still going to do it. I want to get on the motorcycle with you.

Yeah, There you go. There you go. And to have those adventurous pieces. One of my goals is to have a motorcycle and do a big trip through Europe at some point in my life. That's probably in my 40s at some point. But to have that, I think is so important because otherwise all of our, I think Time for Men is very interesting.

Right.

We just sort of have this one giant arc. And so we have to sort of create these demarcations that signify we're moving through these different spaces, these different chapters in our life. And I love what you're saying because you're sort of saying like this for me was this very clear demarcation that I was moving into this more mature version of manhood, masculinity, being a man. Right. And that's powerful. And the piece about your father is also important to be able to have. That sounds really special. So I actually, I feel embarrassed to say this, but I didn't research. Do you have kids?

I don't have kids.

Oh, I was going to say where that fits in.

Yeah. These journeys were. This actually ties it well into what you're saying right now because these journeys made relationships strained and often I was climbing mountains, going, why did it end? And I'm traveling to the other side of the continent and they don't. People don't feel connected when you do that. So I don't have kids now, but I needed to go through this process to be ready for that, to say, I want kids. That's where I am right now. I'm like, I have what I believe that is needed to raise healthy, quality, intelligent kids. I have the resources to be able to raise them well. And unless you go through that process of your own, not necessarily climbing the seven summits, but that demarcation of boyhood's done. I'm ready to be a man. I'm ready to not take because that's what boys do. But I'm ready to give and overflow and provide. That's what men do. You gotta have that line of like, I'm ready.

Yeah. I really appreciate what you're saying. And I think I've seen that with a lot of men who are actively avoiding wanting long term commitment, wanting to be in a committed relationship, wanting to have kids or raise kids, but having this sort of question mark of not feeling ready. And I think what you're Saying is a huge part of it, to embark on a journey of sorts. And I remember I challenged one of my clients at one point.

He was struggling with this. And I said, I want you to plan out just a two night camping excursion and you're going to prep, you're going to get the whole thing ready and you're just going to go out into nature by yourself. And it was the funniest thing. I mean, not funny, but it was very revealing because he planned this whole thing out. And then the weekend he was supposed to go, I was like, okay, you ready? And he said, yeah, I feel pretty nervous, but I'm going to go do it. And then we spoke next week and he said he got out there and was out there, set up the tent and had a complete breakdown, just started bawling because he realized that he had never connected with this part of himself, you know, he had never connected with this part of him that was resilient, that he could rely on. And that's what I hear you talking about a lot, is cultivating this relationship with your own inner reliability, your own inner reliance. So can you speak to that a little bit of what it took in some of these experiences to really have to depend on yourself and to be in that, that right. Mindset. Because in a lot of these environments that you put yourself in, your life was on the line.

Right?

So I would just love to hear your thoughts on that.

The first two that come to mind is I'm climbing Mont Blanc, which is in France, in Italy, it's at the border and it's the tallest mountain in Western Europe. And a storm comes in and we were too slow because the temperature was too high, so it made the snow really sloshy. And we're crossing this ridgeline, not making the speed that we wanted. And we had like, the storm comes in, hits us and it turns dark and we try and set up our tent and the pole is broken somehow in our backpacks. Pole snaps and we can't set this thing up. And we ended up just getting into the tent like it was a, like an extra sleeping bag with just the tent like flapping on top of us throughout the entire night. It's like this little shell of a cocoon that was whipping at us and there was nobody at all that knew we were there that was coming to rescue us. That was like even, even thinking there was an issue. That's like a tiny little example of you gotta just know how to take care of yourself. The second one that came to mind was back on that mountain that I mentioned earlier, Aconcagua in South America, the team left and I was confronted with this choice of am I going to climb higher? Am I going to go back? Am I going to just wait here for maybe they'll come back in like a week and hang out for them. And I look around and I see a few other climbers coming up and there's this old guy, looks like Santa Claus. He's wearing this like bright red shirt, huge white beard. And I go up and talk to him because I'm like, that guy looks like he knows what's up. Like he spent time in the mountains, right? And his name's Frank and he's from Germany and he sure enough has climbed all over. And he's the guy that I went to climb Mont Blanc with. That's where I met him. And just by having this resource of this self confidence of I'm going to go talk to somebody and learn what it takes to like handle myself out here. That's a part of competence. Part of competence is being able to ask and learn, right? So I went and spoke to him and then he's like, come out and climb Mont Blanc with me. And we did. And I learned more out there under his tutelage or his training. So self. Being able to handle yourself doesn't mean being a lone wolf. Being able to handle yourself means being able to ask for help, find resources that are around, you.

Have ingenuity for whatever's around. And that's my definition of grit and resilience that you asked for.

Love it. Love it. What a great way to close. I think if this was like one of those cheesy radio radio shows, that would have been the moment where like we paused you and there was like clapping.

No, but seriously, I think that that is, it's potent. I think it's potent and it's undervalued and under indexed in our current society where we as men often feel like there is an expectation that we need to self actualize our inner strengths, gifts, and we need to sort of figure it all out by ourselves. And I think what I've learned along the way and what I hear you mirroring is that I love that idea of sometimes asking somebody who is your senior or who is a guide that can support you on the journey is competence. And that finding mentorship, finding guidance is a part of competence. And I love that reference and I sincerely hope that people take that away. All right, my friend, we're going to have to wrap up here. This has Been a blast. I love how quickly this interview has gone.

Likewise. Likewise.

Yeah, rock through it. So tell the listeners a little bit about where they can find a little bit more about the Warrior challenge, your book, and we'll go from there.

So the book is available in all bookstores in all countries. It's on Amazon, it's global, it's Penguin Random House. So it's like a proper publisher that's putting it out into the world. I'm personally offering@warriorchallengebook.com if you enter your name and email there, I will give you information about how to get a signed insert that I will personally mail to you if you buy the book. Also, you'll get samples of the ebook and the audiobook. I'm the narrator of the audiobook and I'm creating and I think by the time this is out it'll be ready to roll. But a Warrior virtual boot camp that I'm trying to create it as class credit for any young man who's at home and they'll go through these eight quests and I'll bring on a professional skateboarder. I'm going to bring on a Maasai Warrior. I'm going to have these guys on Zoom, taking your young man and your life, your son through these quests as a social studies credit. So that's also available@warriorchallengebook.com.

Amazing. Amazing. That sounds like an absolute blast. I would love to be a 12 year old kid going through that. It sounds like so much fun. John, thank you so much for joining me. Pleasure having you on the show.

Thank you, Connor.

And yeah, thank you so much. And for everyone that's out there listening, don't forget to man it forward. Share this episode with somebody that you know is going to find value in it, that might be a parent of a young man and wanting to understand how to help develop them and support their growth and their initiation and their rites of passage. And don't forget to leave a rating and review. So until next week, hit that subscribe button.

Five stars. Smash that five star button.

There we go. I love it.

I love it.

So until next week, this is Carl Beaton signing off.