OTH #4: Erik Severinghaus, Co-Founder, Co-CEO, Bloomfilter: The Mountain Gets A Say

And the, the, the tragic statistics around entrepreneurship are are not only do 75% of our businesses die, the figurative death of not returning capital to shareholders and ultimately getting to to outcomes that aren't financially helpful to us, but we as entrepreneurs also have three times the rate of addiction and twice the rate of suicidality of the usual population. And, and so there is both the figurative risk of death of, of like how do we make sure the business doesn't die and, and how do we make sure it's a financially successful outcome Literal side of it, of how do we take care of our bodies, how do we take care of our minds? 110100.

Hello and welcome to episode number four of the 11000 Show. My name is Eric Boggs. I'm the host and creator of this thing. This is a show about founder happiness and I'm very happy to have another guy on here named Eric that's tall that went to Carolina. So you know you're going to love this guy. It's my friend Eric Severinghaus who has had a pretty amazing life and career business wise. He was a co founder at Icontact. He brought Papa John's franchises to Chicago. He's had plenty of failures to go along with plenty of successes, but he's a really bright and deep guy who's really been through some things. He's probably best known for writing a book about his trek to the top of Everest and how he learned through that process how to be a better founder, how to be a better entrepreneur and how to be a better person. We get into some pretty deep topics on this episode. I want you to know that there are mentions of pretty complicated mental health challenges including suicide and suicidal ideation. If you or someone you know is struggling with these issues, please take care of yourself. Please take care. Listening to this episode. If you need help and you're in the United states, you can dial 988-to get the suicide hotline. I appreciate you listening. I think you really like this episode. Eric, my friend, you well named fellow, how are you?

Well and my name is appropriately spelled too. So I apologize for the C in your. That must be a hard way to go through life.

The classic C versus K argument. It has been a very long time since we've discussed that the C is for cool I believe was always my go to. Where does this call find you physically and mentally? Everywhere else. Yeah.

So. So working from home in Chicago. As you know Eric, I grew up in North Carolina and moved to Chicago in 2000. Absolutely love it. Here. And we're about two weeks away from closing out what we think is going to be a gangbust fiscal year with work and, you know, just on the other side of the holidays with family and all of that kind of stuff. So, you know, it feels like no year is boring.

It's like, you know what you go into January thinking, like, heck, yeah, it's January. And then January happens, and it's like, oh, God, like, stretching out your arms a little bit from the long break. And like, the kids are sick and you get sick and it's cold outside, and it's like you kind of got to, like, work your way into it. It's never like the shotgun blast into the year.

Like, you hope it is important annual thing. For about 22 years, I've been going out to Steamboat Springs with a variety of friends and family and other folks for a music festival and ski trip. That always happens, like, January 6th through the 11th, like, right in that time frame. January 12th is my, like, real New Year's.

Good, good. You've climbed some mountains in your life, and I kind of want to talk about that. The metaphor is both on the nose, scaling Everest and building businesses. But it's on the nose because it's, like, accurate and resonant and true. And the thing that I like most about your career story and your book and perspective is there's, like, a sense of counterintuitiveness to a lot of it. Like, when you're climbing a mountain, when you're building business, there's this pressure to go, go, go, and do, do, do. But that's not been your experience, and that's not your teaching. So let's start there. That. That's okay.

Yeah, no, I. I love that. I appreciate it was the lesson. You know, there are a lot of lessons I learned on Mount Everest, and there were a lot of things that I realized the way people can. People. People sort of. They conflate climbing mountains and, and. And. And, you know, scaling businesses. Scaling mountain scaling businesses. Right. Like, people tend to, like, pretend like these things are very similar in a lot of ways. And what I noticed when I was at Everest was that the advice that I was getting from the experts was the complete opposite of the advice that I get from the experts. I'm using air quotes here in the entrepreneurial community. And so when I was at Everest, the focus of my guides and the expert climbers was very much on mitigate risk, be thoughtful, and be efficient to a fault. Rest and recover, because you're going to need Your energy and like, I was the, you know, dumb ass. I hope I can say that on your podcast.

You can, we'll allow it.

I was the dumb ass that was like, I wanted to win every stage of the, like, walk up to Everest, right? And I wanted to go faster and I always wanted to do more. It was like the classic entrepreneurial do more faster. Right. And I had this so ingrained in my mind and my guides had to almost like do an intervention with me and keep in mind, like on a climbing expedition with a bunch of necessarily type A high achieving athletes, because we're all there to climb Mount Everest together. And I was still the outlier of the like, go, go, go, do, do, do. And my guides were like, dude, you are going to burn yourself to a crisp and you're gonna fail. And, and they said, stop, rest, recover. I promise you're gonna use all that energy, but like, use it strategically and efficiently. Right? And, and, and that was my big learning. And then, and then you come back and I get on LinkedIn and, and I, and you know, you read all these LinkedIn influencers and all of them have all of these stories about how they're, they're doing more faster, they're working harder, they're working harder than you are. They're not sleeping, they're hustling.

I want to keep a 5am and cold plunge at from 5:17 to 5:17. Yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And what I realized is like the advice of the people that actually know what they're talking about is the polar opposite of the do more faster.

Yeah. Go slow to go fast.

Exactly. And be efficient.

Yeah, yeah. The, the analogy continues to kind of resonate for me. I've never been on Everest. I, I've done a lot of hiking, right. Like my, my mountaineering is limited to East Coast Appalachian Trail section hikes. And I mean, I've had some pretty unpleasant movements on those hikes. Certainly not Everest. But I know that at the top of Mount Everest there's a lot of trash and there's some dead bodies up there. How does the, how does the analogy kind of play out there? Like the people that climbed the mountain and didn't make it down, Was it luck? Preparedness? And, you know, how does that apply to folks like you and me and folks that might be listening to this?

Yeah, it's, it's, it's all the above. And I want to be really careful to separate thoughtfully the figurative versus the literal. When, when we talk about death and the death zone and things like That I actually start the book by saying that Mount Everest was the. So I. I did see dead bodies. I saw dead bodies lowered down next to me as I was rappelling down the low tse face. I mean, there were. There were about a half a dozen or a dozen people that died on Everest the year that I was there, which makes it a very safe year in the, you know, typical annals of Mount Everest. And, you know, for me personally, Mount Everest was the second. I had a couple kind of hairy experiences. Nothing that I ever thought I was really going to, like, die, die. But, like, a couple of, like, man, I'm not sure how I'm going to get out of this one. It was the second closest that I've ever felt to dying, and the first for me was during my entrepreneurial journey. It was building a company called Simple Relevance, where I had wrapped so much of my identity into the business that when it became clear that the business wasn't going to succeed, like, I lost my ability to understand who I was, you know, candidly, at certain points, lost the will to live. And that's a really, really scary feeling. And the tragic statistics around entrepreneurship are not only do 75% of our businesses die the figurative death of not returning capital to shareholders and ultimately getting to outcomes that aren't financially helpful to us, but we as entrepreneurs also have three times the rate of addiction and twice the rate of suicidality of the usual population. And so there is both the figurative risk of death of, like, how do we make sure the business doesn't die, and how do we make sure it's a financially successful outcome? And then there is the literal side of it, of how do we take care of our bodies, how do we take care of our minds so that we ultimately get what we want out of this journey. And you know that those dangers are obviously at the forefront. When you're on Mount Everest, you're thinking about that a lot. You're thinking about the preparedness. You're trying to make sure that you're lucky. Like, all those things factor in, right? You have to be prepared. You have to work hard. You also have to be lucky. Like, all of that has to come together. It's not all inside of your control. The mountain gets a say and whether you climb it, too. And it's no different than in our entrepreneurial journeys, as you know very well, Eric, you can. You can do everything right and still fail. That's just. That's just part of this game that we're playing.

Yeah, the mountain gets a safe that's exactly right. The market gets safe.

That's exactly right.

And there's nothing you can do about it. And certainly in markets just brutally unforgiving and can change on a dime. Share and appreciate your, your honesty. And I wouldn't have asked the question if I didn't know what the answer was going to be. You know, I've been there too, brother. Like I've been there, you know, many times. And it feels like once you go into that dark place as an owner or founder of just profound unhappiness and just not knowing how you're going to work yourself out of it all the way into like what you experienced, it feels like it's always with you and you know, when you were in that dark place, how did you find your way out of it?

Yeah, so. So for me, and I always want to say that if you're, if you find yourself in these places, number one, please go talk to somebody, talk to friends, talk to doctors. Like, have the courage to get the help that it took me a long time to go get. There's the honest answer of how I first started to deal with it, which is, number one, if you'd asked me, do I have a mental health issue, I would have said absolutely not. Yeah, I was performing at a reasonably high level. I was cogent, I was coherent. You know, I considered people that had a mental health issue to be people that like, lived under bridges or people that screamed at me on the train. Right. Incoherently, not high functioning entrepreneurs. And so for me, it was wrapped up in a few different things. The first thing was I started to feel a profound amount of guilt and shame. And I was very fixated on the fact I was, I was just terrified of the fact that I was going to not win and I was going to not return capital to the people that had invested in me. I mean, look, I've lost, like I've played team sports in my life and you don't always win the championship. And I was certainly not always the best athlete on the team. But like I had never lost in a business context.

Like, like lost, lost, like felt to lose.

Yeah. And I just didn't know how to deal with it. And so I felt shame. Every time I started to feel happiness or joy, I would stamp that part of my being out because I felt guilty about feeling joy. It was like, how can you feel happy? How can you feel relaxed? Don't you know that you're failing? Like, like, screw you, loser. Like, don't you know that you're failing. How, how, how can you, how can you be so self indulgent that you sit here and relax and feel joy? You should be working, you should be hustling, you should be grinding, you should be doing more in some way, shape or form. And so that sense of like, profound guilt and shame and I didn't really feel like I could talk about it because there was a lot of like, yeah, but these are all choices I made. Nobody told me I had to do this. This was all something I wanted to do. In fact, people told me not to do it and I wouldn't do it anyway.

Yeah, I created this mess. I hired these people. Yeah. I made these decisions. It's all on me. I have to. It's all on me. And there's no one else I can. Yeah, yeah.

And by the way, there are starving children in Africa and there are people with way less quote unquote privilege than my white heteronormative, like, whatever. All the different things that people want to remind, like, like, like that society wants to tell us that we can't ever feel bad thoughts because, you know, we're privileged in some capacity.

Yeah.

And I internalized a bunch of that crap. And I, I, I, I basically just decided that like, not only were my problems existential, they were simultaneously existential to my being and also things that I didn't have a right to feel. And so you try and square that circle of like, I don't even know who I am as a, as a person. I'm now a failure, which is something that I never thought I'd be. And I don't even really feel like I can talk about it because that also feels self indulgent. And, and, and, and like all of a sudden, like, my brain couldn't find a way out of the mess. It couldn't find a way. It couldn't find, like, a series of actions to solve the problem that it found acceptable. And so what started to feel like the acceptable course of action was like, I don't know, man. Like, what if I just like, slipped and had an accident and then just like, didn't wake up? Right.

Yeah.

And so, like, you asked me, what did I do? Well, there were a few things that I did just on instinct that I later came to find out are actually really, really valuable. The first thing was I made sure I didn't have any firearms. I didn't have access to drugs that had high toxicity. I did a lot of things. The average, I think, time, from like suicidal ideation to completion of suicide is something like six or seven minutes. And research shows.

Yeah.

That if you can prolong that period, their survival shift rates go off the charts.

Yeah.

And so like I didn't know that I had a problem, but I also knew that I had a problem enough.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You knew enough to not at least take some preventative action and then.

But I'm not going to have stuff around that might kill me. Like it was, it was that kind of, that like if I end up in a dark place, I don't want to be able to get to the game over before I have the chance to recover. Was like a lot of my things.

Yeah, yeah. A quick aside. I mean, we've, I've known you for a long time. We've known each other for a long time. Full relevance. Was an old school, rough boss client. Like way back when we, like I was interacting with you when you were going through this and I had no idea.

Yeah.

I mean I had no idea. Like, and I get it. Like, I would not have told anyone. You just said you didn't, you didn't know or think that that was even a thing.

Yeah. And to that, to that end, Eric, most of my friends, family, people who were very, very, very close to me, who kind of later read about it, I mean, they would have all said the same thing. Yeah, my, my issue was manifesting. I was shorter with friends. I was less patient, I was less kind, I was less thoughtful. Like, I think I probably have friends that would say like, oh yeah, you were kind of a jerk for like a year there. So there was like a little bit of that. Like, I wouldn't say that I wasn't manifesting any symptoms, but like, I didn't even know what I was going through myself. I couldn't figure out how to even like understand it in my own brain. And so like I wasn't talking to anybody about.

Yeah, yeah. So you, you, you recognized that things weren't good. You took some steps to like some self preservation action. What were the baby steps after that?

Yeah. So it kind of started with like, there were a couple quotes that I would read them and they would like, almost make me cry. And like the poem if by Rudyard Kipling, Teddy Roosevelt's man in the arena speech.

Yeah, yeah.

Like, I could, I could still recite it word for word and like, and so what I really started to do is like, I had no concept of what was going on, but, but I knew that like I needed someplace to start, like debugging what was happening inside. And so I kind of started with those. And I started getting more into philosophy. I started getting more into, like, Buddhism and stoicism. And I just started reading. I started reading a lot less TechCrunch and Pando Daily and started reading, like, a lot more of, like, the classics. And for me, I started to. Now, at the time, I was also. I sold Simple Relevance, which, like, simultaneously helped and hurt the situation that I was in. Realized everything just felt tense and wrong. And so at some point, I don't even really know why I did it, but at some point, I also started to talk to a therapist.

Yeah.

And the therapist, which, by the way, I cannot recommend highly enough for people in the entrepreneurial journey.

Cosign on that.

Oh, my God. The therapist helped me start to unwind. I do know why I did it. I went through a nasty breakup, and I've been through multiple breakups, and I felt like I was repeating the same pattern in my relationships. And so it wasn't really a, like, fix what's going on in my head so much as, like, I have this pattern of behavior that I'm recognizing, and I need to figure out how do I break this pattern? And I couldn't figure out how to break it myself. And so I went to a therapist, and I was like, like, there's gotta be something here. Can you help me debug and, like, break this pattern?

Yeah.

And so the therapist, unbelievably helpful. The. The reading and what I came to realize, like, there was this, like, moment of, like, was like, Rudyard Kipling. The guy's a poet. Teddy Roosevelt. That guy was like. Like Teddy Roosevelt, whatever. You could read all the books.

He's a category on his own. Yeah, sure.

He can't even. You can't even classify him as whatever. Right. And it's like, somehow those people have felt and captured this feeling that I feel that I see that, like, nobody else, from what I can tell, can I, like, have a conversation with. And they almost became, like, my confidants. And then. And then it became like, Marcus Aurelius, and I started to read a bunch of his stuff, and I was like, all right, so this is all external to me. It's not internal to me. Right. And then, so. So, like, that, and then, like, Buddhism and like. Like, like the. The Tao Te Chong. Like, Like a bunch of that stuff. I just started, like, down this rabbit hole of, like, reading all these, and they all, like, hit me.

Yeah.

In a whole different way. And so it was a combination of a whole lot of self discovery. And some therapy and then probably sprinkle in some meditation, which I started to get pretty serious about. And like, all of that together started to allow me to kind of start to unwind a bunch of these knots.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The only thing I'll say is I was self medicating from a whole bunch of the anxiety with a lot of booze and, you know, various other substances, and I started to. To. To develop a much healthier relationship. You know, I've never been a teetotaler. I'm not a dry January spiritual adherent, but. But I did start to develop a much, much better understanding of, like, why I was drinking, why I was using substances.

Yeah.

What was it that was leading me to some of that? And like, was I using some of it as a shield to hide behind or a way to, you know, whatever? And so once I started to understand a lot of those dynamics, then I started to unwind a lot of that too, and I started to be way, way, way more intentional about how I think about some of those things.

Yeah, well, it's. You can't. If you're a mess internally, you can't address the mess externally. Right. And, you know, from what you described, you slowed down, you took care of yourself, you took care of your body, and that let you start to heal Eric, the person. And that is what's created Eric externally. That's been. That's had a lot of success and has been able to, you know, do a lot of other amazing things. That's. That's inspiring to hear me point.

The other big point that I want to touch on, because it's kind of where we began, is I came to realize what bullshit it was to put all of this stress onto myself, candidly. I came to authentically forgive myself. And this was what I think prompted yours. And my conversation Here was a LinkedIn conversation we had around.

Yep.

I learned how, and I use the word learned intentionally because I do believe it's a learned skill. I learned how and relearned how to forgive myself for making mistakes, to recognize that I wasn't perfect as a CEO, as CEO of simple relevance. And that's okay. Perfection's an unattainable goal. And as I go through this phase of the journey, you know, now running a new company, I try very hard to be the opposite of that. I try very hard. It's like opposite George. Right? Like, like, what would Eric of the past done? All right, well, Eric of the past would not have allowed himself to feel a modicum of joy because things Were going perfectly.

Yeah.

Current Eric is very much of the like. Like, we have to be serious, we have to be focused. Everything remains imperfect and we need to work hard to fix it. This is an unforgiving game. The laws of capitalism are unforgiving. And we either, we either succeed or, or you know, we, we fail. That's a tautology. But like, we either work hard and like, like, like figure out how to make this thing work or we're gonna have to stop playing this game at some point. That's the reality of a venture back startup.

Yeah.

However, none of that means that we shouldn't feel joy and happiness along the way, that we shouldn't relax, that we shouldn't, all of that kind of stuff. And so that has very much been a part of the ethos that I am admittedly imperfect at. I still get tight, I still get anxious, I still get frustrated. My team will tell you I can, I can be a little bit of a hard ass at times.

Yeah.

But I'm trying very hard to bring a smile and a joyful disposition to what is a lot of very hard.

Well, it's, it's the pros perspective on this. Right? Like the mountain has a say.

Right?

Right. Like, you know, you, you can show up with an amazing team and great set of ideas, but markets change and tastes change and unforeseen things happen in the world that are going to have a far greater impact on your business success than your smarts or your background or whatever else you think that it might be. And accepting that and letting go of the hubris and the ego, man, that's hard. That's hard. I'm 44 years old and it's hard. I hope that I'm 84 years old one day and can at least acknowledge that I made some progress, but it's hard, man.

And what I'll say, what I've come to appreciate in the entrepreneurial journey, like, what's the point of all of this anyway? Right? So like, what I have come to appreciate is for me, the fact that it's hard is the point. Like this is the, the whetstone that allows me to sharpen the sword of how do I put the ego aside? How do I, how do I accept some of the reality of life? How do I be a better communicator? How do I be a better per. How do I be kinder? How do I be better at forgiveness? How do I take these existential and cardinal virtues that humanity has understood since time immemorial are critical. And it Is the point of, like, our time in this body, with this consciousness on this planet. How do I get better at that? Well, what I have come to find is, like, the entrepreneurial journey. Like, the reason I missed it so much when I wasn't in it is because I wasn't moving up on that ladder at all. And so now, like, I try to. I try again, imperfectly, to really have this perspective of, like, embracing and appreciating the fact that it is so hard because it's. It's. That. It's like the fact that your foe is so well trained and like, this mountain is so difficult to climb. Like, that's what makes it the point. Right.

It's.

It's the cliche of Sir Edmund Hillary. It's not in the mountain we climb. It's ourselves. Right. And, like, it's.

It's.

It's no different in this journey than it is in any other.

Yeah. The. The thing that you wrote on my. On my only 10 explicitly give myself permission to be happy despite things being imperfect. I mean, tattoo that right here. Like, that's. I mean, that is a summation of a lot of it, and that's a summation of a lot of it for. So my wife is really different for me. I mean, it's probably been a long time since. Since you've been around Kelly, but you know Kelly, and Kelly knows you. She's what I describe as easy happy. She doesn't have these issues, like, when the house is a wreck and the kids are screaming and whatever. Like, she. She is Zen. Like, she can be happy in that I am incapable. I'm hard happy. I am very hard to be happy. And it took me a long time to understand that. What I didn't realize until recently that you said very well is you actually have to let yourself be happy. Otherwise. Otherwise, like, it's unattainable. It's so elusive. You will never have it because something is always wrong. Something is always. Some charts always pointed the wrong way. Some kids always like, screaming about something. And so you just have to let yourself be happy.

It's. It's hilarious to hear you say that. I certainly do remember Kelly. And absolutely lovely. Right. Similar to you. Opposites attract. Right. I married my wife, Dana, who edited my book many times over. And it's. It's hilarious because when she. Probably the chapter in the book that. That most resonates with people when they read it is talking about imposter syndrome. And I have people from all walks of life, every modality, nothing to do with entrepreneurs, and they want to talk about imposter syndrome. Dana read the chapter on imposter syndrome, and she looked at me and said, is that a real thing? Like, do you think anybody other than you has ever felt this so similar to you? Like, this just comes so naturally to Dana.

Yeah.

And it is just the absolute opposite for me. Like, I have to. I have to have, like, a protocol and a framework and an intellectual understanding to get the rest of my being there.

Yeah. Yeah. I want to. I want to ask one last question. Talking point here. And you alluded to it, and it's about the privilege of successful, heteronormative white American guys.

Sure.

Talking about their. Their shit. And it's complicated. Right. Like, Drew Houston just recorded a podcast with Lenny, the Lenny. Lenny podcast guy. And if you haven't listened to it, you should. You will identify deeply. And it's pretty amazing to hear Drew Housen talk about it, because he is as good as it gets in terms of a founder operator, and he struggled with all of this that we've described. And then he kind of slips in a line that was like, okay. He's like, well, yeah, I had to just get away. And so we went to our house in Hawaii, and I was like, okay, okay, buddy. And I'm not. I'm not denying his struggles. Your struggles, my struggles. But it's. I don't know. I don't know if guilt is the word that I feel. Maybe it's just unawareness of it. That's complicated. I think it could be true that a lot of people have problems way, way worse than me, in part because they don't have any money and they don't have. They have financial stress in their life. And also, like, my shit is my shit, and your shit is your shit. And that doesn't make it any. Any different. But I wanted to get your. Your take on that, because I know that you're. You're kind of fluent in these matters, and it's. It's an area where you spend a lot of time thinking and talking about in writing.

Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, here's the thing, right? I. I am a huge believer that all of us, whatever circle you want to draw, we all in this world have a tremendous amount of privilege. We have a lot more going for us. Like, you can always point to somebody and go, I have it way better than that person does. We all, like. We all have, like, compare. What I. I think. I think the line is comparison is the thief of joy.

Sure.

And so, you know, without Getting political. I've never liked the idea of let's all line up together in a line on who has more privilege than the other one based on height, weight, sex, gender, skin color, etc. Now again, that's an easy thing for a straight white guy to say. I get it, I hear it, I understand it. There's a lot of reasons that I don't take a megaphone and, like, wade into these issues. You know, a lot of times I'm not sure anybody really wants to hear or care what I have to say about it. Since you asked me, Eric, what. What I will say is, comparison is the thief of joy, and that is a universal human experience. No matter who we are. We can look at people that have more on a variety of dimensions, and we can look at people who have less on a variety of dimensions. None of that changes. And by the way, we can look at people contemporaneously, the people that we exist on the planet with right now. We could look at ourselves historically.

Oh, yeah, I throw that one at my kids all the time.

It's my favorite line to use with my kids whenever they say something isn't fair is I say, you know, what's really not fair is how much more you have than everybody else. And so if you want life to be fair, I can make it more fair. But by the way, let's take the. Let's take the mean global caloric input for children on this planet. I can restrict you to that amount of calories and we'll see whether you want life to be fair enough.

Yeah, right.

So for me, like, what. What I had to realize is I can simultaneously be very, very grateful for the tremendous number of blessings that I have, Time, space, living in this country. Like, I. I can be unapologetically grateful for the fact that, like, I have a life that I very, very much enjoy living, and I'm not going to apologize for that ever and anywhere. I can also recognize that there are things in my life that I perceive to be problems that I have to figure out how. And, you know, you can take it. You can take it all the way back to like, Jesus Christ dying on the cross and saying, you know, forgive others for what they've done, they know not what they do. You know, here's a guy going through a terrible, terrible ordeal, being foisted upon him, you know, not worried about feeling sorry for himself, you know, trying to figure out how does he make the world a better place by driving forgiveness into other people, right? And so I would pull all that. Back around to say that, like, I don't think any of this stuff's mutually exclusive to me. Like, like the, the. The problem that we get into. The problem I got into. So let. Let me take it out of the, out of the world and let me personalize it back to me. The problem I got into was I refused to acknowledge and I refused to stare down the very real issues that I was facing. And I hid behind a variety of tropes that I had internalized as a way of avoiding the very real problems that I had.

Yep.

Once I realized that I could both be grateful for what I have and I could recognize that I had some things that I had to work on, and I could go spend energy working on those things, and I didn't need to worry about what anybody else thought about. I could just go do it. And I put away all the excuses. Well, then it was way easier to untie a lot of those knots.

Yeah. That was therapist lesson number one for me. Frankly. One of the things that got me to a therapist was things are going so well for me, but I'm unhappy. And I feel bad because I'm unhappy because my dad grew up in a dirt floor house.

Right.

With no heat. And who am I to complain about that? You know, like, no one in my, in my family went away to, like, there's a. You know, there's a lot of, like, where I come from and who I am. And. Yeah. And it was my therapist that was basically like, you know what? That's fine. And you know what? The thing that you need to learn is all of those things can be true at the same time.

Right. And the thing I'll add to that, I know we're way over time here, but I'll let you edit it.

Yeah. So now you're. You're going, dude, we're. This is all. This is all going in. This is good. The, The.

The thing I would add to it is, like, I try to be really thoughtful and sensitive. I'll tell you, like, one of my pet peeves in life is, like, rich white guys that sit around and all they do is complain about taxes and, like, complain about the thing that they don't have. Okay. And, like, not to say that I've never complained about taxes in my life, but, like, I try to be sensitive and thoughtful about the things that I have and the way that that may come across in terms of. Of what it is, I complain about that being said. The journey, the human journey that we are all on. The Joseph Campbell hero's journey of, like, how do we face down whatever dragons happen to be lurking in the caves that, you know, we are all on that exact same journey together, regardless of skin color, regardless of gender, regardless of income bracket. We're all in the same human journey in a lot of ways. And so the recognition that we're in it, the recognition that, like, it's part of our life that's just accepting reality and ignoring that, it just doesn't make any sense. Right. And so on the one hand, like, I don't complain about the material stuff to your point, because, hell, man, I've got it pretty good. And it doesn't. Like, I don't think it makes a lot of sense to sit and complain about that. I don't think it sets the right example. I don't think it's the right mindset for me to have. And it's not the stuff that drives it anyway. Right. On the other hand, the like, all right, I'm going to be real and acknowledge that I'm trying to figure out for the time I have on this planet, how do I best live it? How do I experience joy? How do I bring that joy to others? How do I be more generous? How do I be more kind? How do I. How do I embody and live those cardinal virtues? Like. Like, I will say unabashedly that I'm imperfect at that. It's still bothers me that I'm not good enough at it. And I'm still working really, really hard to get there. And, like, there's a lot of problems that I'm still trying to figure out. How do I solve? And there's. There's a lot of wisdom I want to get from others because I'm still not there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a journey and a process. You might say it's like climbing a mountain. Eric, I appreciate all this. I really do. I appreciate the depth and the consideration and the thoughtfulness in the way that you communicate on these issues. And honestly, I think that the best thing that you or I or anyone can do that is kind of a little further into this founder entrepreneurial journey than others is to just talk about the reality of the struggle and the reality of the process and how it's unavoidable. So thank you for that. I do want to wrap up with one more question. What have you been listening to lately?

What have I been listening to lately? So I just got back from Steamboat and I will plug the Wilder Blue. Played a show that absolutely blew my mind. And it do you know the Wilder Blue? Eric? I know you like good music.

I just wrote it down. And I will listen to it.

Yeah.

Usually hang out.

Check it out. Paul Eason and. And Zane Williams. Paul's the. The lead guitar player. Zane's the. The. The lead singer. They both have a great solo catalog with them as well.

Okay.

They came together for the Wilder Blue. And you'll like it, Eric. Right.

Yeah. I know that we have very similar tastes, certainly in Americana and country, so.

Yeah. And you ought to come out with me. You'll like that, too.

Yeah. For real. I've. I've. I've only skied out west once. I've been mostly in North Carolina. I skier. So, like.

Well, you know, come out, listen to the music and enjoy the skiing on the side.

Yeah. Well, you told me the dates. Pinch me in for 20, 26.

Yeah, man. I'm gonna send you an email.

All right.

You all heard it. It's been documented now.

Yeah, there is. It's going to be on the Internet. It's on the Internet. We have to do it now. Thanks, everybody, for listening to this episode of the 1100 show. I am your host, Eric Boggs. Thank you to our production team of Rachel Velasquez and Danny Chiu. Research team of Benjamin Rogerson and Heine Blargwood. Screaming in the intro and outro provided by the Boggs children, Thomas, Catherine and Barbara. We'll see you next time.

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