Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Cleared Hot Episode 68 - Toxic Masculinity and Mentoring

Episode Date: January 21, 2019

Not only does everyone seem to be talking about "Toxic Masculinity," I seem to be receiving multiple emails about it every day.  Full disclosure, I have not being paying much attention to the discussion, for the reasons I go in to detail during the episode. I'm not a fan of the term, or any term that is overused and under defined.  If I had to pick one leadership style that is the most impactful, I would choose mentorship.  It is how I was shepherded from being a young punk in the Teams to an individual capable of operating with little to no oversight in high risk, high consequence environments.  I have been asked to create episodes on mentorship for young men and women, and the more thought I have put in to it, to the more convinced I am that they are not the target audience, the parents are.  I close with my EDC and some food for thought when it comes to choosing to carry a concealed weapon.  Here is the link to the full audio and video from the radio call in the podcast opening (it is not me in the call):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WIsmvTtMNc  

What's going on, everybody? Episode 68. Getting up there. I'm like Joe Rogan up there, 1,200 and probably 68, but good enough for me. Monday, here we go. This one is not going to be an interview, obviously, if you read the description of the podcast. So like I mentioned for this year, I'm going to be a little bit more targeted with my approach. The interview ones will be what they are. Q&A ones that fill the gaps in between or when the demand of questions reach a certain point.

I'm only going to focus on a few and try to dig into them and keep them a little bit shorter than the interviews, aiming to keep it under an hour. And that's what this is going to be. Episode 68 is going to be questions from you via social media or email. So essentially, episode 68 is brought to you by you. Those of you that are giving me your time, being gracious with your time to listen. to the podcast and submit questions. And on that note, thank you for the interaction and communication.

I love getting the questions via social media and the emails as well. I get a couple emails every single day for a variety of topics and a variety of reasons. Some of them are more awesome and irregular than others, but I do enjoy getting feedback. On the podcast front, what is new? So like I also mentioned a few episodes ago, I'm going to come out. I'm redoing the t-shirt side of the house. So next week, maybe even actually the first week of February, super simple design. It's going to be a T-shirt and a sweatshirt.

That's going to be it pretty much for 2019. Simplicity and doing more with less is going to be my goal. So think simple. That's the design concept for what is coming. And also before I dig in, I'm going to answer this question. early on in the podcast for those of you who don't make it to the end because this comes up very often. The radio call for fire that you are about to hear is in fact real. It is a communication between a controller on the ground and an A10 in Afghanistan.

You can find the complete radio call on YouTube. And if you're interested in watching the video, which shows the heads-up display of the pilots, it was a flight of two A-10s, doing gun runs. Actually, I think they shot some rockets as well. But if you want to watch the whole thing, I'm going to embed that in the textual description of the episode. And you can go to town and check it out. It is real. It is not me, but it is awesome.

And that's it. Let's dig into this. Episode 68, brought to you by the listeners. Here we go. So I have two main questions, or I guess I'll call them topics for today. I think they're a little bit close. they tie into each other. One of them seems to be the topic de jour of the modern day. That is toxic masculinity and my thoughts around that. And the second question was posed to me via social media,

and that is, do I have any intentions on advising or mentoring young men and women, specifically in the military? And the things that I would likely be out of the government, and the things that I would likely be asked to advise them on or tied into the conversation when it comes to toxic masculinity. I hate calling it that, by the way. Spoiler alert. So I'm going to dive into the mentoring side of the house first, and then we'll wind up on the masculinity side of the house. So with that question, and again, the question was, do I have any intentions of advising or creating a, specifically a podcast episode for advising and mentoring young men and women, potentially or specifically those that are in the military. And I actually have thought a lot about this before the question even came

up. My answer is, I would love to, but the more I think about it, I don't think that recording a podcast episode on any of those topics is the best mechanism to have the greatest amount of impact, especially for young men and women. For people who are in the military, they're at a different age demographic and a different understanding of who they are as individuals. I think for that I could maybe provide some best practices or some experiences that I had. But when it comes to people who are still, let's call them kids or young men and young women, I just don't think a podcast dedicated to mentoring them is the correct medium. And I say that because the more I think about this, I don't think that the kids are actually the target audience for the message

that I may or may not have. If I could pick that target audience, it would be their parents. And before I get into why, I would pick the parents. Full disclosure, I'm not convinced at all in any way, shape, or form that I am the right person to mentor anybody else. I've said this time and time again. There's a reason that I call my blog Confessions of an Idiot. it's largely how I think of myself six days out of the week if not seven the military background that I have it gets far too much attention and not all of the experiences from that background are

relatable and at the end of the day I'm still trying to figure myself out and I don't know how comfortable I would be trying to mentor other people's kids so I say all that because because, or in saying all that, what I'm trying to say is take what I say with a grain of salt. The reason I would rather talk to parents boils down to really one key thing. And that is, in my experience, what I've seen in my own parenting with my own three kids, is that words, which would be the podcast medium, absent commensurate action, from people that those children look up to, which would be the parents. So words, without the commensurate action, they're totally meaningless.

If kids were to listen to a podcast and then turn it off and have a thought in their head or a goal or an aspiration and they turn around and they constantly see behavior at odds of what they're hearing, what is actually being accomplished. So I view this from the lens of my own kids and what I want from my own. kids. And in a nutshell, and this is not a complete list by any stretch of the imagination, but I want my kids, two boys and a girl, to grow into amazing young men and a young woman who are honest with integrity that is beyond reproach, they're compassionate, they're caring, they have the ability to control their emotions instead of being controlled by their emotions.

They're physically capable. They are. financially responsible, et cetera. I could go on and on and on. And I hope that any parents listening to this have a list that is a magnitude greater than the one that I just wrote down and you could list them off. I would hope that all parents think those things for their kids or want those things for their kids. But when I think about this, and this is again, for my own kids, if I tell my kids that I want them to be honest, but they see me and hear me lying, And I tell my kids that I want them to have integrity, but they see me or hear me not being a man of my word. And I want them to be compassionate, but they see me as an emotionless robot.

And I tell them to be caring, but they see me as cold and heartless. And I tell them to control their emotions, but they constantly see me as a loose cannon with no emotional governor. And I tell them, I want them to be physically capable, but they see me physically weak. and I put in no effort to be capable myself. And I tell them I want to be, or I want them to be financially responsible, but emotionally, or not emotionally, but they see me making emotional decisions

when it comes to finances and I have uncontrolled debt. If I say all those things, but they see all those other actions, do my words even matter? Does it even matter what's coming out of my mouth? In my opinion, It is the example that I set as a parent and the example that every mother and father sets, whether they're in a nuclear family of husband and wife still together raising kids,

or they are separate in whatever family structure it may be. It's the example that the parent set that actually matters. And I just finished a trip with my two sons, which involved, my sons are 15 and 13, It involves some travel and airplanes and some car rides, and I have no doubt that they were tired and uncomfortable at the end of the day. And I have no doubt of that because they told me often. And they're great young men, but they're exactly that. They are young men. And it's very trying as a dad for me to set the example for them that I want to see from them,

especially when they have their special 13-year-old and 15-year-old moments. And if you're a parent, you know what those moments are. Those are the moments where your kids are just little shits. And it seems like they are hell-bent on twisting your screws, and they know exactly where to apply the torque to elicit the reaction from you that you want. It is, it's simple for me to blow up on them, or I would actually say what's even worse, and I actively try to avoid this, and I see it often in others, and it breaks my heart.

Blowing up is obviously terrible, but I almost think that worse is to pull out a phone and disconnect from them altogether and disconnect from the world and just get lost in whatever you're looking at on your screen. Either way, if I blow up on them or I choose to detach and ignore the behavior, what example am I setting?

Now, for me, perfection is not possible. I don't believe that it is, and I certainly don't live up to that, being perfect, I mean. I don't always do the right thing. Surprisingly enough, though, I always know what the right thing to do is. I just don't always do it. It's a constant battle, but it has to be more than just words. And that is, again, why I don't think a podcast is the correct medium for that particular topic. And I don't necessarily know what is, but I suspect it has something to do on the experiential side of the house.

If I could create the fairy tale scenario that I would want to take my family to or learn the lessons that I'm truly trying to impart, it would be very heavy on experience and very light on talking. Maybe a, well, 70-30 would be perhaps a ratio that I could throw out. there. I don't know if that's a retreat. I don't know if it's an event. I just know that it has to be impactful and the experience has to be lasting. One person, I've never been to one of his events, but Ryan Mickler, who is the founder of Order of Man, I believe he has started to crack the code on these types of events. And like I said, full disclosure, I've never been to one of these events, but I do like the message that Ryan is pushing. And I have an understanding of what his events are based around. So look into those, go to order of man and take a look at the

events that he does. Or hit me up with suggestions because I'm not, it's not that I'm against creating something or involving myself in something like this. It's that I just don't know the correct recipe. And I think having an audio message only that your kids were to listen to, it's just not going to have the same impact. It has to be something that is driven from you, the parents listening to this and your behaviors. So yes, I'm in. I just don't know exactly what I'm in on. Now, to the second part, the toxic masculinity portion of the questions that I received. It was essentially what are my thoughts on toxic masculinity. I have paid almost no attention to the discussion that is happening on what it seems to be a daily basis.

I'm aware that Gillette, the Razor Company, just made an ad, apparently had something to do with, I want to use the term, attacking but addressing. Toxic masculinity, I'm done saying that word because it's hard enough to say as it is. I haven't seen it, but I'm aware that that commercial exists. the reason I am not actively paying attention to this discussion and I'm not too worried about what Gillette has to say is that I don't know how much I buy into the word toxic being associated directly and only with masculinity. I just said I wasn't going to say it anymore and I just did. So there you go.

I'm a liar on today's episode. I say that because I don't know of anything or. any behavior that is not going to become dangerous if it's taken to the extreme. And if you wanted to call that toxic, I would agree with that definition inside of that context. As an example, innocuous things that people may never think about that could easily become toxic if not deadly. How about food? We stuff our face three to however many times a day people choose to eat. but there is a spectrum when it comes to food you could go as deep as you want to into quality macro and micronutrients you could weigh and measure your food you could design it for aesthetics you could

design it for performance or you could completely eat yourself to death cause your organs to fail because they're being compacted with fatty tissue or the other side of that spectrum you could have no food and you could end up starving yourself to death. So on both sides of that spectrum, you could end up dying from something that most people consider to be totally innocuous. Another one that falls into that category. Water. You could only drink Fiji water and I have no idea why I just chose Fiji water. I don't know if it's more clarified or healthy for you than any other water. You could have that britter filter in your fridge, whatever it may be. It's completely possible, though, with water to over hydrate yourself to the point where you die. And it's also possible to die from not having

enough water. So both sides of the same, I'm sorry, not both sides, two sides of, or two extremes from one item. Exercise. There's some people who lose their mind. when it comes to exercise. And I don't care if you're exercising for capacity or you just want to look better naked, you can absolutely kill yourself with exercise. One of the ways I know for sure is through rhabdomyelysis. Throw that thing in the Google machine and it's going to come back.

It's basically muscle tissue getting shed, the protein's getting into your bloodstream, it shuts down your internal organs, and from what I've heard, I've never had it, probably one of the most painful ways to die. The other side of that coin would be what? you are not exercising at all. You're totally sedentary and unconditioned.

You have no capacity whatsoever. So again, two sides to the same coin. Those are kind of, I would say, more physical things, but it applies, at least in my experience, to just about everything. Something I hear all the time about, again, in the modern day. Discipline. In my opinion, you can take discipline too far, and you can also not have enough of it.

So you have some choices. You could have no discipline and your life is going to be a complete and total mess. You're going to miss deadlines, get fired from jobs, be late all the time. You're going to be in just bedlam. Or you could have nothing but discipline and absolutely no enjoyment of your life whatsoever because you're so completely focused on the discipline that you're missing all of the joy that could come from having a moderate or healthy amount of discipline. in your life. And then all, as far as bringing up particular things that I'm talking about, aggression is the last one I'm going to talk about in this context because it seems to be

associated with those terms. In my opinion, again, there's a coin with two sides. And when it comes to aggression, if you are unwilling or unable to be aggressive in any way, shape, or form, you just abhor aggression. You refuse to take part in any level of being aggressive. And you are opening yourself up to victimization. And on the other side of that is that you have too much or no control over your aggression. You're just wildly unchecked. You're probably a psychopath and you need to be put down. So the healthy spectrum of all of those, food, water, exercise, discipline, aggression,

and that list could be 10 times the size of what I just listed. There's a healthy medium somewhere in between. Everything has an extreme. to me and the reason that this topic is off putting at least as far as my attention goes is it seems like everybody is living there and by there i mean at the extreme there is no middle ground whatsoever it's all or nothing it's either masculinity is toxic get rid of all of it or the other side of the house is you know masculinity cannot be touched there is no give and take and i don't buy into that The best analogy I have for toxic masculinity is oxygen and the closed circuit diving that I used to do when I was in the military.

So I'll give you a little bit of a description about the system that we used. There's two types of diving. There is open circuit diving, meaning you still have a tank of some kind on your body, so compressed gas. You breathe in, but when you exhale, your exhalation bubbles are allowed to escape the system. And if you're underwater, it makes a funny noise as it goes by your face. The biggest thing for a military utilization or a tactical capacity is those bubbles rise to the surface. They disturb the surface. And anybody who knows what they're looking at could go, oh, hey, there's a diver under the water. The other side of that is closed circuit diving. The rigs that we used, or sorry,

I'll describe closed circuit diving, you still have a tank of compressed gas somewhere, but in this particular setup that I used when I was in, I believe the teams may have moved on, but I used the LR5 Drager, which is a closed circuit system, meaning that when you inhale a compressed gas and exhale it, it does not exit the system. Instead, it's pushed through a chemical filter of either Sotazorb or softenolime. And what that does is it scrubs the carbon dioxide from your breathing loop and passes the oxygen back into your or available. becomes available for inhalation again because you're not using up all of the oxygen with every inhalation and exhalation. In that particular system for the lar5 with closed circuit diving,

you are breathing pure oxygen. So you have a very small tank of pure oxygen, but because you can scrub it so many times and that chemical is so effective, you can stand to water for a really long time. And as a side note, because it's pure oxygen, it's amazing for hangovers, which has absolutely nothing to do with what we're talking about, but I think it's an important side note. So if you have a really bad hangover, maybe go do some closed circuit diving, you know, if you have the chance to do so. Now, how does this have anything to do with toxic masculinity? Close circuit diving with oxygen has very defined parameters for acceptable use. You can stay underwater for approximately four hours on one of those tanks, which is

actually a short dive in comparison to what some of probably both commercial and military divers do. They do multiples of that. For me, though, four hours is more than enough time ever underwater at any one time. I am completely fun metered out by about 30 minutes in and the other three hours and 30 minutes. It's not that exciting, especially if you're the swim buddy who has nothing to look at because when we dive as pairs, only one person gets the attack board, which is a compass, depth gauge and a stopwatch. That's your TV for the entire time you're diving. Well, your dive buddy doesn't have one of those, so he doesn't have a TV. He gets to watch you watch the attack board and contemplate the most effective way to commit suicide while he's underwater. So define parameters.

You can stand her for up to four hours, you know, plus or minus a little bit. And as long as you stay, that four hours applies, as long as you stay from, you know, essentially the surface to 20 feet underwater. There's little to no danger with that system. But below 20 feet, which we called an excursion, because you were going past the parameters, you start entering the realm where you can encounter oxygen toxicity. And the toxicity specifically is pulmonary oxygen toxicity, which is elevated partial pressure of oxygen. It's essentially oxygen under pressure, and it can do some interesting things. So we know it can be dangerous. But we also understand the advantage that that system brings.

So what do we do? We set parameters and we stick to them. You're allowed one excursion because you might need to go deep to hide essentially from a, like you're in the middle of a channel and a shipping container boat comes over the top of you. You need to get down underneath that vessel so you don't get chopsued by the propellers. So you have one excursion that's allowed. and as long as you can get back above 20 feet in a reasonable amount of time, you're fine. You can continue with the dive.

Your risk of oxygen toxicity is relatively low. Two excursions means abort the dive immediately. So we assess the risk and reward, and then we operate inside of that ecosystem. Yes, we know it can be dangerous, but yes, we also recognize that there is incredible benefits if it's applied properly. It only becomes toxic. and again, I'm talking about oxygen, the gas that we walk around breathing every single day. It only becomes toxic when there is a deviation, or another way that you could put that when it's taken to an extreme.

All of the things that I've talked about, to an extreme, I don't think they're good on either side, but if you have a healthy medium for all of them to include aggression, aggression, I think there's extreme benefit. And I look back at my own life growing up, and the behaviors that people are discussing now, they existed when I was growing up. There was just different terminology for people who acted that way. You were called an asshole, and you dealt with the consequences. Masculinity to me, or as defined by me, I would almost choose to call it morality. And in my opinion, it applies to men and women.

all ages. So when I think of masculinity, I think of integrity and courage, discipline and honesty and compassion and capacity and humility and humility. And that's what I want both of my sons to be. That's the morality that I want them to have. And I consider those traits to be associated with masculinity. But I don't want my daughter to have any less of those traits because I associate all of them with femininity as well. The pin in the ground that seems to trip people up on this is one of three things. Aggression, violence, or competition. That seems to be the pin in the sand where people make this huge difference between boys and girls, men, and women.

And in the academic world, I suppose you can talk about things like erasing aggressors. and erasing violence and making a competition-free ecosystem. But I've never seen that in the real world. It would be amazing if we could erase violence. From what I've seen with my own eyes, we cannot. And any attempt to do so is a waste of time. It's totally futile. If you're listening to this, pick any belief that you hold dear.

Now, think of somebody else out there in the world that holds the, opposite belief equally as dear. Because regardless of what you believe, there is somebody out there who holds the opposite belief. If you are an X person, there is a Y person. If you are a blue person, there is a red person. It doesn't matter where you fall. Your axis is out there somewhere. And I say that without making a moral judgment as to who is right and who is wrong. Because I don't care what the belief is. My point is just that there is somebody out there with an opposite one. and those individuals that hold the opposite belief that you do are probably the vast majority of them amazing people but not all of them just like not all the people who hold the beliefs that you do

if you encounter one of those people that holds an opposite belief and a different scale of morality they are going to prey on the weakness of others not only are they going to pray on the weakness of others they are going to seek out people who are weaker than they are so they can exploit, manipulate, and damage them. On the topic of violence, you know, toxic masculinity in the topic of violence, it should never be accepted. I abhor violence. If you feel that way, I wholeheartedly support your ability to feel that way. I'm not going to argue with you about that. All I will say is that the belief that violence has no place or,

abhorring violence, it does not and it will not keep you safe from violence. In my opinion, an understanding of aggression and violence, along with parameters established and understood for its use, is essential. I personally believe it should be avoided at all costs, which is possible in theory, but not in practice. And in practice, if you have no capacity or no will for it, there is going to be a victor and a loser. If you have no capacity and you have no will and you encounter it, I'll let you fill in the blank as into what side of that equation you were going to fall. All of my kids, both my boys and my daughter, they are going to have an understanding of this.

They will have an understanding of aggression and violence and the parameters that I've been speaking about. If they didn't have those parameters and had no understanding, and they only had the extremes to work with, all or none. Without those, I would say yes, that's dangerous. It is the parameters that provide the healthy medium. And then on competition side of the house, I don't know why people get so up in arms about competition. I think it's essential.

I think you need to get comfortable losing. I think you need to learn how to learn from losing and create an ability to derive motivation from that loss. not an expectation of a participation trophy. Last thing I'm going to cover today. Briefly, I get hit up all the time about this one as well, is my EDC, which stands for everyday carry. Essentially, people are asking what type of gun I carry

or do I carry a gun every day. In addition to what else do I try to have with me at all times, I carry a gun most days, and before people hit me up and ask me what type, I have carried a variety of guns throughout the course of my life. I prefer currently the SIG 365. I like the compact nature of it. I like the fact that it holds 12 rounds in the magazine.

So most of the time I have that on me, near me, with me. And I have a blowout kit in my vehicle. I do not carry medical supplies on me at all times. I have a pretty robust blowout kit in my vehicle, though, at all times, which I'm usually relatively close to. And I said this time and time again, the most important thing that I pack for my everyday day carry is my mind. And you'll hear the term situational awareness thrown around quite a bit in the modern day. I've used it a few times myself. I think it's important to realize there's two pieces to that.

One is the situational awareness of your external environment, and that is maintaining connectivity with the world you're interacting with. Instead of walking around with your face down, an electronic device, having no idea what's going on around you, which essentially sets you up for being surprised constantly. Detached from that electronic device and engage with the world around you, so you have less of an opportunity to be surprised. You're more aware of the environment with which you're navigating. The second part of that situational awareness, which I feel is less discussed or discussed less often, is the awareness of your internal capabilities. So one is the external environment. The second part of situational awareness is your internal abilities. So I

like I said, I carry a gun with me. And if you carry a gun with you, think about this. If you as an individual who choose to conceal carry, if you're not current and competent with your weapon, if you do not shoot regularly, if you cannot shoot competently in a variety of shooting positions, in a variety of lighted positions, or not positions, lighted situations, you are nowhere near as capable as you think you are. Situational awareness also has to be. applied to yourself, to your training, and your current status when it comes to capability. Just food for thought. So there's the external world and the internal world. Both of them come together and you need to be prepared in both. Most of the time you see people focusing on the

external versus the internal. And like I said, that's just food for thought. I will do a deeper dive on that particular topic in the very near future. And that is it for today. Like I said, I was going to keep it short. I think I nailed that thing at under 40 minutes, which is perfect. three questions and we're out. That's all I got for this week. See you, I think, for the next few weeks with some interviews. I'm headed to the shot show tomorrow. By the time this episode is being listened to,

I'll probably be on an airplane headed to Las Vegas where I'm going to hide in my hotel room because I hate that damn city. But actually, if you're in there, hit me up on social media. If you want to meet, I'll be cruising around the show. And for anybody out there who is a fan or listens to the podcast, I'd love to meet you. That's it for the week.

thanks everybody i don't know what to say i'm constantly blown away by the volume of feedback that i get thank you for all the reviews on itunes the ratings on itunes if you haven't written one i mean you're dead to me that's basically what it comes down to actually it's not true at all if you have a time to write one do me favor write me a review on itunes good bad indifferent suggestions whatever you have i'm totally open to feedback what else man i think that's it like i said the news a new t-shirt, not the new t-shirts, a new t-shirt with a few versions of that t-shirt. We'll go live here in the next week or two.

Pretty cool sweatshirt design, and that's it. Just trying to keep it smooth, simple, and streamlined for 2019. Hope you are too. See you guys next week.