The Skinny Confidential Him & Her Podcast - How To Build Your Character, Battle Depression, Speak Your Truth, & Evolve Ft. Kyle Creek AKA "The Captain"

Starting point is 00:00:00 The following podcast is a Dear Media production. She's a lifestyle blogger extraordinaire. Fantastic. And he's a serial entrepreneur. A very smart cookie. And now Lauren Everts and Michael Bostic are bringing you along for the ride. Get ready for some major realness. Welcome to The Skinny Confidential, him and her.

Starting point is 00:00:21 I think a lot of men in particular want to control their life and they want to plan their life and they want to know that they checked all the boxes. I think that's largely what led to much of my depression was trying to control too many of the uncontrollable things. And whether it's dating or it's your career or just your friendships, when you try to control everything, you don't truly ever experience anything because you're approaching it from almost like this 10,000 foot view where you're trying to look at how it plugs into a larger picture and you're just never really present. And I think that's what really prevented me from connecting with people. And it also prevented me from just connecting with myself through a lot of those years. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Skinny Confidential Him and Her Show. Today, we're sitting down with Kyle Creek, also known online as The Captain. Kyle is a writer, creator, and self-proclaimed instigator. He's also a new father and the author

Starting point is 00:01:14 of multiple bestselling titles. Today, we're sitting down to talk about Kyle's story, his struggle with depression. Many listeners struggle with depression, and this could be an enlightening episode with tactics and tools on how to battle that depression. Growing up in an overly religious home and how that affected his personality and how these things affect the way that he lives today in his life. I know that is a very common story for many of our listeners as well. We also get into the importance of evolving as people and how making wrong decisions can actually help you grow in ways that you wouldn't be able to until you recognize it years later.

Starting point is 00:01:44 He finally gives tips to people on how to grow as a creator, person, and constantly refine their lives and get better. This episode is for anybody that wants to refine their life, level up, feel better, and just operate better. With that, Kyle Creek, the captain, welcome to Skinny Confidential, him and her show. This is the Skinny Confidential, him and her. Did you have an epiphany where you decided that you were going to be super open about depression? It wasn't an epiphany. It was more, it was like a necessity at that point. 2019, prior to that, I'd had this catch persona for probably five or six years, and it started as a joke. I was working in advertising at the time, and I was tweeting

Starting point is 00:02:20 a lot of one-liners and stuff that I would write into commercial scripts that would get... Clients would reject my copy because they figured it was too brash or too crude to be on TV. And I'd be like, ah, it's too good of a joke. I'm not going to let it die. I'm going to tweet it instead. So I started doing that under this captain persona because I didn't want my real name attached to it because it was during when cancel culture was first starting. And I was so stoked to have a job in advertising because I've been trying to make money as a writer for many years. And I was paranoid of losing my job. So I didn't want my real name online anywhere. So I went into this persona and then it just started picking up steam. And it got to the point where I was getting more work or more contacts through the captain than I was as Kyle Creek. And so I kind of just

Starting point is 00:03:01 unintentionally started to embody that character online. And everyone called me the captain. No one called me my real name anymore, except for old friends from high school. And then in 2019, I had almost like a crisis of identity. And I didn't really know who I was anymore. I quit advertising. I left my job because I was tired of living in New York City. And I moved to LA and nothing was panning out for me. I thought I had some connections to get writing and TV. And so I just went through a real dark spell and not having myself to fall back on. I just wallowed in my depression and started feeling really shitty about myself. And I knew the only way I could maintain what I was doing online and also a sense of just feeling like I was being honest with my fan base was to just come out about everything. So I took a break from social media and I came back and I

Starting point is 00:03:49 just told everyone, I was like, listen, I've been dealing with some horrible depression the past few months. I wrote a very long post on actually being suicidal. And from the outside looking in, it looked like I had the life. In advertising, I was more or less like a hospitality creative director. So I spent 90% of my time on airplanes, in hotels, in restaurants. I would come in and like rebrand, reconcept restaurants. So I had a very badass life, if that's what you're looking to live in your late 20s, early 30s. And so when I came out and told people, you know, this isn't it, like this life isn't

Starting point is 00:04:18 doing it for me anymore, it shocked a lot of people because they thought like I just looked like I was living the life. I think that's a lot of people online that look like that right i agree 100 yeah it's like you're putting your back i mean this is now not a new concept but people are putting their best life forward and you know people aspire to have this life that they don't realize some people may actually not be enjoying so i i actually never put my best life forward i was very brash and i was always posting about being hung over and drunk i didn't really concern with how I was perceived. It was kind of just almost like how rebellious can I appear online? And so I wasn't even like worried about what people thought of me. Like I used to, if I lost more followers

Starting point is 00:04:55 than I gained after I posted something, I felt that was a successful post. I was like, all right, a bunch of people dropped off. And so I was kind of just like unhinged a lot of the time because I wasn't taking it seriously. It was just me writing and saying what I wanted to do. And when you started battling depression, was this something that you'd battled throughout your entire life or was this something that just came on as you started changing careers? I think I've had it most of my life since a teenager. I don't think I identified it as that. It was more or less me feeling lost because I grew up LDS. I grew up Mormon. And when I was around 15, I started questioning that religion. I pushed

Starting point is 00:05:31 away from it entirely. I stopped viewing my parents as like a reliable source of information. And at that point, it was kind of me against the world. And that's how I viewed my life all through my 20s. And it got me fairly successful because I was very brash in meetings. And when it came to working in advertising, that mentality helped me a lot. What's that like questioning your parents at 15 years old and pulling the Wizard of Oz curtain off? It's incredibly lonely. Specifically, when you're a teenager, you're already kind of feel fairly lost. But when you step away from a religion that at that point was kind of your whole identity, the whole way I viewed the world, the way I viewed everything was based on this religious upbringing. I couldn't watch R-rated movies growing up. I would see

Starting point is 00:06:15 people drinking caffeine as a kid and I would assume they were a bad person because it was taught to me that you're not supposed to drink caffeine. And I would have neighbors that weren't LDS and it was kind of like, they were like the you didn't befriend them and so I had this really constricted view of the world growing up and so when I decided that the religion no longer really appealed to me it was it was lonely it left me very susceptible to also outside influence because I was looking for something else to kind of fill that void of belief in my life. And I think a lot of it just kind of fell back on how popular I can become, how much attention I can get. And I really deeply wanted to prove my family wrong. I didn't want them to see me live in an unhappy life and think, oh, if he still had religion in his life, he'd be fine.

Starting point is 00:07:00 I wanted to do the opposite and be like, no, look how successful I'm going to become and look how happy I'm going to be without your religion. And so it kind of made me approach life from a state of rebellion as opposed to having a purpose. My girlfriend always likes to say that she says, it's always better to live for something than against something. And I was very much living my life against things for a long time. At what point did you shift that and stop living things against things? Probably 2019 when I had that very impressive yeah yeah very depressive episode up until that point i didn't really take my online persona that seriously i had a large following a lot of people would tell me you need to be more responsible with that because i would intentionally write stuff that would divide

Starting point is 00:07:40 people and i would intentionally write stuff that would upset people like yeah just the way i would approach dating and i would just make jokes that I knew were gonna offend a lot of people like give me an example I can't think of one in particular off the bat but if you look back to any of my my prior writing before like 2017-18 you'd see exactly what I'm talking about and if anyone does that my social media they'll see the kind of way I approach things like I was very much i don't know how to put it but i was very much into just trying to be as clever as i could but in a way that i knew would upset someone i think this happens in politics a lot and lauren and i always say like

Starting point is 00:08:14 we try not to get so political on this show so i think easy low-hanging fruit and we all know this type of content is if you choose like politics is an easy example you choose one side or the other and you know you're going to say things that one side favors over the other and it's going to completely alienate like you know that's a an easy way to get engagement i think it's much harder online to create nuance and get both sides kind of questioning and having a difficult time kind of jumping in with a rah-rah like hey we really support that i think it's i think it takes a much more kind of creative thinker and writer to kind of create content where both sides are like, huh, I don't know how I feel about that. Does that make sense? I would agree because that's where I feel my career is now.

Starting point is 00:08:55 Yeah, being more in the middle. Yeah, well, not just in the middle, but being more just like, I want to be more positive than negative at this point. And so when I came back in 2019, I put my real name on social media for the first time. And I started writing in a way that kind of helped people evaluate what's going on in their own life. And then when 2020 hit, I mean, a lot of people like the joke that it was an IQ test, but I think it was more a character test than anything. I think a lot of people failed the character test. What was the character test? To see how quickly you would turn on other people. And I think a lot of people failed that. And I took pride and I told my girlfriend at the time,

Starting point is 00:09:32 I had a pending book deal with the largest publisher in North America, which is this book right here. And it came out middle of 2020. And I told my girlfriend, I said, my entire career has been built on me speaking out. If I don't speak out now, then I've been a complete fraud. And so I made the decision early on in 2020 that I was going to use my platform to help people question things, but also kind of bring people together and have them view it from a sense of togetherness as opposed to that immediate divide. And I also accepted the fact that I might lose my book deal for doing it. And I told my girlfriends, if I lose the book deal for this, it's still worth it for me

Starting point is 00:10:07 because there's a chance they could pull my book deal if they see that I'm not jumping on the bandwagon with everything that's happening. And a lot of my peers in writing, because I came from the advertising world, I know a lot of very talented writers and a lot of very good editors. And I saw the way they used their skill to quickly fear monger and to quickly upset and divide people and it made me sick and I didn't want to be a part of that and like you're saying the side thing I had a lot of people during especially during 2020 early on say why aren't you choosing sides like why don't you just announce what side you're on now yeah same thing happened to us and I would

Starting point is 00:10:41 tell people I have chosen a side I've chosen the side of the people. That's the side I'm on. I'm on your side. I'm on their side. I'm on everybody's side to try and help bring us together. And I actually look back on that and I'm very proud of myself. And as a father, that's kind of where my work lives now is if I were to pass or die, I would want my son to see what I've written and be proud of the man that his father was. And so that's where I approach a lot of my work now. And I don't get nearly the engagement I used to. I don't go, quote unquote, as viral as I used to because I came from an advertising background. I knew how to incite attention from people. If someone's listening and they want to incite attention, how do you do that be divisive

Starting point is 00:11:25 exactly what he's saying yeah and it's very easy to do that and people will be divisive even about things they don't believe about they'll just choose the side that they feel is the safest division to be on and so during the pandemic mask or no mask i don't wear a mask at all no i actually wasn't asking you that i know i know you didn't wear a mask yeah i mean i i did tell you that but i'm saying that's a that's a way to be divisive on social media is to ask that question yes absolutely i mean not not so much anymore but i mean i did when i had to because i had to in order to grocery shop for the first few months in la and i had to to travel for work sometimes and it always just irked me that i was doing it. Yeah, it was a very unsettling feeling.

Starting point is 00:12:05 It was very unsettling. And recently, I mean, I just recently flew to Korea and Cambodia. And it was like two months ago. When I was there, I still had to wear one on the plane there and stuff. And I'm not going to make a scene about it. I wasn't going to be the kind of person that was going to, you know, get all up in arms about something that most of the people, most of the workers have no control over.

Starting point is 00:12:24 They're all just kind of trying to keep their jobs. And so I did it in the sense I was just trying to make things easier for people. I didn't want someone to have to come up to me and be like, listen, it's our policy. I didn't want to put a worker in the position to have to come confront me because, first of all, I'm an intimidating looking individual. And I didn't want to have to have that negative interaction. And so I played along as much as I had to just to kind of feel like I was helping other people go through their day. You wanted to blend into the wall. No, I don't blend in.

Starting point is 00:12:52 Trust me. No, but I mean, like instead of like making a scene, you just kind of weren't neutral about it. The problem is, is that you had two different groups of people assuming they were on the side of righteousness, right? That was the difficult part. Like one side was saying basically they don't, they didn't want their liberties and their freedoms trampled on, which is, you know, very valid. And the other side was saying, you have to do this for the greater good because they felt that the information

Starting point is 00:13:16 they had at the time was valid. Right. And the problem is, is that both of those sides couldn't recognize that each side had a very valid point, right? Like if you're a long-term thinker, the more liberties you give up, the worse position you're going to be in down the road and future generations down the road. That's clearly starting to happen and has happened. You're a short-term thinker. Also, you say, well, I got to be able to get through this existing moment safely and make everyone else around me safe. So the problem is, is that you had long-term, short-term people thinking on both sides, both were maybe right, but both couldn't see each other's sides. Well, now one side's clearly right. Now everything's coming out one side.

Starting point is 00:13:53 Of course. And I'm not arguing that, but what I'm saying is at the time, if you put yourself in that 2020 mindset, people failed to recognize the humanity in both sides. And that's what I was trying to do. I was trying to approach from humanity, but I also, I wouldn't support businesses that enforced me to do it. Like, especially after everything kind of came out at the first few months. Like if I went to a restaurant and they had a big sign, we just, we just didn't support them. I stopped going to those restaurants. We went to the ones that, I mean, I was in new Orleans and I was walking around with, with my dog. I was driving across country when we moved. And I didn't have

Starting point is 00:14:25 a vaccine card. I couldn't get in anywhere. No one had let me into a bar. And my friends were saying, why don't you get a fake one? I was like, I don't want a fake one because I don't want to play along in that way. I don't want them to even know that I have a fake one because then I'm playing along with something I don't agree with. And then finally, some lady let me into her restaurant. And she was telling me through tears how much COVID has affected her family's restaurant because they can't get enough people in and they're going to lose the restaurant. And she was telling me through tears how much COVID has affected her family's restaurant because they can't get enough people in and they're going to lose the restaurant. And she was so polite to me to let me in after everyone else was telling me no. I really fell for her. And I had a lot of friends because I did work in the restaurant world in New York that lost

Starting point is 00:14:59 their companies, that lost their family's restaurant. And I went back to New York and nine out of ten the places they used to love to go they're gone and they're gone for good and it breaks my heart to see that happen to people no and many aren't coming back there there's some like old posts people could probably find in my archive stores they look where i started talking about the worries of inflation back in 2020 and i was like hey this is going to happen like you got to start protecting your money you got to start thinking about inflation and everyone's like what the fuck are you talking about but it's very easy easy for someone like me, who's more of an economic background, to understand.

Starting point is 00:15:27 You overinflate the economy by printing a bunch of dollars and not increasing production. You're going to have the dollar power weakened over time, which is going to hurt people's spending power, which is going to hurt their cost of living, which is going to hurt their ability to support themselves and their families. At the same time, you destroy their businesses artificially without the market deciding. So it's basically just government doing that. People can't recover from that. And so the problem is now you see all this turmoil in the market, you see banks collapsing, you see people not being able to afford their rent. Then they go to businesses saying businesses need to support this and raise salaries, but the businesses can't afford to do

Starting point is 00:16:00 it. So we're in for some economic hardship that was artificially created because businesses were shut down at the expense of safety. And now they may never be coming back. And people are going to feel that burden, I assume, for the next five to eight years. Yeah. And I think the best thing people can do to whether that turmoil is to stick together. I think people need to avoid being divisive and they need to avoid blaming sides. And they need to understand that the humanity in all of it and people can just have some compassion and empathy for each other. And I think a lot of people lost that sense of empathy. It's very quickly online.

Starting point is 00:16:36 You look at any comment section on anything that's slightly controversial and people quickly go to that lower the flies mentality and they start ripping each other apart. Something that's cool about you, though, is that what I like about you is that you've evolved your point of view. I feel like we're held lately that we cannot evolve our point of view. Like we have just because you used to be divisive that you have to be divisive now. You're saying, hey, I used to be divisive. I changed. I changed my opinion. And now I'm not divisive. And you're evolving your thought process. I appreciate that. I appreciate that, too. I mean my opinion and now I'm not divisive and you're evolving your thought process. I appreciate that. I appreciate that too. I mean, if you're not involving, what's the point of

Starting point is 00:17:09 actually even living your life? I mean, and that's kind of where my work is. I mean, right now I have a children's book coming out. It's the first children's book I've done and I've had multiple publishing deals. I could not get a publisher to pick that book up. I had 15 rejections for it. Why? Because I'm an unproven children's book author. My agent and I pitched 15 large literary houses that we all thought would take it. Even my current publisher wouldn't take it. They all rejected my children's book. And it was offensive to me because a lot of the stuff they said was, oh, you don't have the right audience. It rhymes too much, just kind of bullshit answers. And when they say I don't

Starting point is 00:17:44 have the right audience, what do you mean like people don't grow up like you don't think that people that have followed me for five years ago have kids now or have nieces or nephews their friends have kids like it was so short-sighted of them to not pick the book up so I did finally find a publisher that was willing to do it on like a hybrid model but even the fact that it was it was essentially they were doubting my own ability to evolve as a writer. And I just thought that was shocking to me. I didn't think that was going to happen. If someone's listening and they want to evolve in something,

Starting point is 00:18:14 say let's just pretend that they have a job where they do creative, but they want to evolve into finance. What is your advice? You have to be willing to be wrong. You have to be willing to learn. I think the hardest thing for people, say you're excellent in creativity and you want to move into finance, you're not going to be good at finance at first. And it's hard for people to go from being an expert in one field to being a newbie in

Starting point is 00:18:33 another. And I think that's what a lot of people aren't willing to do. And that's kind of how they unintentionally pigeonhole themselves into a career path is they just stick with what they're good at, even though they might have desires outside of that because they're afraid of looking dumb and they're afraid to look stupid and they're afraid to, you know, have to be wrong for a while. I was reading your bio when we started and we kind of skipped past this, but at one point, you know, you were going to be an athlete and you, well, you blew out your knee or you. Yeah. I mean, I did play, I played football in high school and

Starting point is 00:19:00 it kind of came back to what I was talking about, where I just wanted to be accepted after leaving my religion. And I was a big guy. Everyone in my small town in Utah played football. It was a big deal. And so I played football because I figured it would be a way for me to be popular. And I was good at it because I was big. I got a scholarship in college for it. And I went down and I played, I think, two weeks in the actual season, blew my knees out.

Starting point is 00:19:20 And it was almost a godsend because I never liked sports anyway. It was just something I was doing because it was expected of me. And when you get into college, I mean, you have to really love what you're doing to play at that level. And the reason I was asking is because you were addicted to painkillers. And I think this is a topic that is maybe relevant for this show because we talk about addiction a lot and addiction has touched our family. But I don't think people realize something like that happens and the doctors prescribe you something, how easy it is to get hooked on this stuff. Yeah. I mean, it came, it wasn't just what was prescribed to me.

Starting point is 00:19:50 It was because just in that sports realm, it's everywhere. Even when my prescription was like short-lived, everyone else always had them or they knew someone that had them. Yeah, it was easy to get them. And when I stopped playing ball, it was just very easy for my friends and I just to, you know, we would just take, you know, a couple of hydrocodone and just go walk around the mall. You know, it was just shit we did. And we were like 18, 19.

Starting point is 00:20:09 And then it eventually came down to where we started doing Oxycontin and we started, you know, trying to up our game. And I had some friends getting heroin. I had my old roommate actually passed away. This was around like 2009, 10? No, this was like 2005 and 6. Your roommate passed away from an overdose when you were living with him yeah so i actually moved out so what happened is he i actually it was something i actually had a hard time coming to turns with because i was the one that got him into painkiller

Starting point is 00:20:35 use he had never actually used painkillers and he injured his back and he got a prescription i think for percocet and i told him i, you know, you're taking those wrong. What are you swallowing them for? You're supposed to snort those. I kind of introduced him to the recreational use of painkillers. And he ended up going very far down the other path and becoming a heroin addict. And I found out about a year after I moved away, because I moved away to clean up. I left college and I moved back home.

Starting point is 00:21:00 And I haven't even taken a painkiller since. I mean, I had like a severe chemical burn on my hand a couple of years ago and they prescribed me Percocet and I just gave them right back. I was like, I'm not even going to touch that stuff anymore. I have a hard time even taking ibuprofen if I need it just because it feels too reminiscent for me. So he ended up overdosing and I got a call from a friend that he died at a party and they took him and left him on a jogging trail in a park. And someone found him jogging the next morning. And just he and I, the time we lived together, we're like inseparable.

Starting point is 00:21:29 We were like brothers. Like we even scheduled our classes in college to be together. Like we would be like, oh, you take that course, I'll take that course. We would take the same classes together so we could spend more time together. For about two years, we were like really, really tight. And when I heard that, it was a real gut punch

Starting point is 00:21:44 because I kind of felt responsible because I was the one that kind of introduced him to that life. And then I had to acknowledge the fact that he was an adult and he made his own choices and he chose to kind of go further down the path. And I had to kind of release myself with some of that sense of responsibility for what happened to him. Do you think the depression that you experienced later than life had to do with that and also with what you experienced with religion? Do you think it was like compounded or do you think that that had nothing to do with it? I don't think his death or my painkiller use contributed to my depression at all. I think my depression largely stemmed from my religion

Starting point is 00:22:18 because I grew up feeling very suppressed, particularly when I stopped looking at my parents as like a source of life advice because I couldn't approach them for simple life advice because the answer was always, oh, read your scriptures, pray about it. I didn't want to hear that. I wanted someone to talk to me as a human. I wanted my dad to talk to me as father and son, not religious leader because my dad was fairly high up in the church. I didn't want him to talk to me as a religious leader to someone who's struggling with belief in God kind of thing. I wanted him to talk to me as a human. And so when I had that me against the world mentality for so long, I just closed off emotionally to a lot of people. I didn't allow myself to connect very deep with my friendships. My dating life in my 20s and early

Starting point is 00:22:57 30s was just completely reckless because I wasn't trying to connect. And I prided myself on the fact that, oh, I'm being honest, though. Like, these girls know that I'm not looking for something serious. So I'm not hurting their feelings. If their feelings get hurt, that's their fault. Because I'm very upfront about the fact that I'm not looking for a relationship. And it's just kind of my way of, you know, alleviating some responsibility on my end.

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Starting point is 00:28:12 There's a weird thing I think people experience in life as we age. There's like a morning of sorts where when you're a child and you look to your parents, you look at them as the people that have all the answers in life, right? Those are the, you know, and as you get older and your parents get older, and not to say they're not wise and have great information, but there's some areas of life where you start to realize they may not have all the answers or they may not be right about certain things, or you may actually be more knowledgeable in certain subjects, especially as technologies move faster and people get older, businesses change. And you experience this kind of phantom death in a way because you're used to viewing your

Starting point is 00:28:49 parents as the people that have all of your life's answers. And then when you realize, wait a minute, maybe they don't, and maybe you were wrong about that. There's kind of this weird thing where even though they're still here, you've also experienced, it's not a letdown, but it's a feeling of like, oh, wow, that's not my north star anymore like i have to also go and figure things out for myself i imagine if you're in a religious community that's tenfold because you have that and the gospel of god or what they're portraying as god at the same time right and so all of a sudden if you start to turn against all that and you start to realize wait not only do my parents on all the answers but my religion doesn't either you're kind of left in a weird state of mourning even though there's been

Starting point is 00:29:27 no death does that make no it makes absolute sense i i felt so empty in my teenage years because i i didn't have any idea what i what i was living for and even my 20s i felt that way and kind of what you're talking about with your parents is i look on at my life now and i'm 36 i think okay when my dad was 26 he had my brother who was 12, me who was 10, and my young brother who was seven. And I'm like, fuck. I couldn't imagine being 36 and having a kid almost be a teenager. And I got to remind myself that my parents were kids raising kids because that generation, I mean, you had kids fairly young. Especially Mormon. Yeah. Not to generalize, but- Oh, definitely. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:30:02 We just had some of our good friends were on the show and they had their kids when they were like 18. Their kids are fully grown and they had their kids when they were like 18. Yeah. Their kids are fully grown in their same age. My parents got married after, I think, knowing each other for six weeks. And they've been married for 38 years now, I think. It's just unheard of. And so I have to always have that grace

Starting point is 00:30:18 when I think of how my childhood was. And I've had long talks with them now, particularly because I'm working on a memoir that's going to be very open and heavy. And so in working on that, I've had to kind of process some things. And so I'll call them and say, hey, I need to talk to you about this. I didn't realize this was really affecting me. And so we've had some good heart-to-heart conversations. I'm a huge proponent of having children just because I think having children makes you have an extreme amount of empathy for your parents. When you're growing up,

Starting point is 00:30:44 so many of us grew up angry with our parents and the way they raised us. And it's not until you have your own children and kind of look back like you're talking about to realize like, oh, wow, they were going through some shit too. And maybe in many cases, we're much younger than we even are. Yeah. I mean, I'm stoked to be a dad because it has helped me creatively as a writer, but it's helped me make peace a lot of my past. Almost as I watch the things that develop my son, I look back and it helps me reparent what happened to me at that age or things that I started taking on. I don't know that I would ever be in the level of emotional maturity I have now had

Starting point is 00:31:18 not become a father. I was deathly afraid of becoming a dad because I prided myself on my independence. And I thought that having a son or having a kid was going to hurt me in ways that would make me less creative. It would make me boring and it would kind of pigeonhole me into certain ways of life. And it's been the exact opposite for me. I needed to become a father and I'm glad I became a father later in life because I don't know in my 20s that I would have been that good of a dad. It might've forced me to kind of get out of my shit earlier. So it might have helped me earlier. But the single most formative thing that's happened in my life is becoming a father by far. It sounds like before you got married that you were a serial dater. I'm not married yet. It sounds like before you got with your serious girlfriend. Yeah, we've been together for almost five years. I wasn't even a serial dater.

Starting point is 00:32:06 I was really focused on my career. And I was focused on kind of my own life. I would go like months without ever going on dates. I never really serial dated. But it's just when I did date, it was hard and fast. And I never really tried to make it into anything more than something that could be quick for a week or two. So now do you feel more leveled out that you're in a relationship that you really cherish? Absolutely. The way I lived, I think was beneficial for a short time because it kind of

Starting point is 00:32:39 introduced me to a lot of different facets of life because I was kind of always trying to crave something new. And a lot of it was me trying to spur my creativity and I kind of told myself I'll be a better writer if I experience more so if I do this this this and this like it'll be more chaotic and that from that it's that you know it's that that bullshit cliche of like the tortured creative kind of I intentionally tried to create that chaos in my life quite often because I thought that it made me a better writer or if I did something that was ended really fucked up I'd be like oh this is gonna be a good tweet like I'm gonna think of something really funny after this and so like I sought that kind of stuff in my life in a very unhealthy way and I'm very I'm not even that active on social media

Starting point is 00:33:18 anymore I have a hard time even convincing myself to want to do it because the writing I like to do now is I like to to disappear for a month and I like to work on something and really kind of hone it and analyze it from a lot of angles as opposed to when I was trying just to fire stuff out every day. A lot of men and women do, and I don't know if you, maybe more men, and I don't want to generalize here, but you probably have friends like this too. I have a lot of my guy friends that have like set a hard rule about when they will settle down and get in a relationship. Like for example, they'll say like, I'm going to be single and date until I'm 40. And then when I'm 40, I'm going to get with

Starting point is 00:33:48 somebody and then I'm going to have kids. And I feel it's kind of silly for me to observe now as a father because I just look at it. I'm like, it's kind of such a dumb rule. Like you're setting this boundary where you're going to potentially miss out on a great thing because of some weird rule or thought that you have in your head about when an appropriate time is to settle down, quote unquote. I also think it's people just grasping for control. I think a lot of men in particular want to control their life and they want to plan their life and they want to know that they checked all the boxes. I think that's largely what led to much of my depression was trying to control too many of the uncontrollable things. And whether it's dating or it's your career or just your friendships, when you try to control everything, you don't truly

Starting point is 00:34:28 ever experience anything because you're approaching it from almost like this 10,000 foot view where you're trying to look at how it plugs into a larger picture and you're just never really present. And I think that's what really prevented me from connecting with people. And it also prevented me from just connecting with myself through a lot of those years. That makes sense. It makes 100% sense. So if someone is listening and they want to write, and I ask a lot of writers this because I'm always curious, what is your writing routine to get these books pumped out?

Starting point is 00:35:00 Because it's not a joke to write a book. It's a lot of work. Do you have like a routine that you do? I do now. a joke to write a book. It's a lot of work. Do you have a routine that you do? I do now. I used to not at all. When I wrote that book, when I wrote Speech Therapy, and I actually wrote two different versions of that. I've written seven books before that. I wrote very chaotically. I wrote whenever I had the free time because I was traveling a lot, and I'd write on planes or write at night. It doesn't work for me anymore because the work I'm trying to do now, I feel is more meaningful, and I feel it's deeper or ride at night. And it doesn't work for me anymore because the work I'm trying to do now,

Starting point is 00:35:25 I feel is more meaningful and I feel it's deeper. And also being a father and having a household with two great Danes and two cats, like I have to have a routine now. So I used to think routine made people boring. And as I get older, I realized routine is like the answer to everything. Routine is really what makes life bearable, but it also makes you successful. And so I try to wake up now around

Starting point is 00:35:49 five. My girlfriend's son get up around 7.30 or 8. So if I get up at five, I have good two and a half, three hours of quiet time. I leave all the lights off. I make my coffee. And before I take that first sip of coffee, I try to be behind my laptop. And I'll write for two and a half, three hours. And a lot of it will be shit that the next day i'll look at and i'll delete a lot of writers go through that where like most of what you write you don't like but i'm getting it done and i know you guys had steven pressfield on here and that's reading his book the war of art really changed the way i approached my own creativity because i had never had this idea of resistance i just always thought i was lazy and

Starting point is 00:36:25 I had a lot of negative self-talk where I would just be like oh you're so fucking lazy and I would just like I would like military speak myself into working I would just talk down on myself until I started getting shit done but the way you know he talks about in that book just doing like the small things and I've tried it for the first time and the amount of work I can get done now by just doing a little bit every day is just, I used to go through these manic, like I'd write every day for seven days straight and I'd write like 10 hours a day and I'd go crazy with it. And it's not nearly as productive as just doing two or three hours every day. What I love about talking to him and hearing from guys like yourself is,

Starting point is 00:37:01 what's so inspiring about Steven is that, I mean, if you heard that episode, he didn't really have success until he was in his fifties. I mean, he, you know, and then since then it's like what, 27 or 30, something crazy in the amount of output of books he's done, but it took like 50 years of him like doing that work to get there. I think so many of us young people, we, we think like we need to have it right now. And if we don't, we're a failure. And so we'd stop putting in the repetitions and having like talking to a guy like him is super helpful for us because you're like, oh shit, like we're just getting started. Right.

Starting point is 00:37:27 Like we can work another 20 something years and basically get to where he, where he was. Right. Like that. It took him basically five decades to build that writing career. I still don't think I've written my first real book. It's a healthy way to look at it. I told my agent that I think the book I'm working on now is my first real book. I think the seven books up to this point were kind of practice and that's probably where I get the hardest on myself

Starting point is 00:37:49 is like you're saying I look back go I'm 36 if I had started writing books at 23 I'd have like 14 done by now and like I'll get down on myself for not being more productive but a lot of what I write about I mean I don't a lot of writers they use like other people's lives as inspiration like they'll find you know like an old historical story and they'll twist it into something relevant which is what i did for that fucking history book but i did in a very brash way that bores me now i can't do that anymore i can only write about things from my own life because i feel like i get something out of writing it almost like a therapy session with myself and so the work i'm doing now i couldn't have written 10 years ago i couldn't have written five years ago i couldn't even written it two years ago

Starting point is 00:38:30 and that helps me not feel so pressured to put out more books because i remind myself well shit this book i had to go through these experiences to write this book and this is a book i'm supposed to be writing right now so that's kind of how i look at my work now yeah every. Every once in a blue moon, we get a couple of critiques on this show. Once a blue moon, not very often. Yeah, right. But like some of it is, you know, I used to, you know, they've changed or it's gotten different. You're like, there's some guys we've been doing this now. That's the fucking point.

Starting point is 00:38:55 That's the point, right? Yeah, but who wants it to be the same all the time? I can't. Here's the thing. We also, to your point, we don't have the ability to do a lot of the stuff we did when we were, you know, we did when we were you know 600 episodes ago and you know you know five seven years younger right like our lives change as we've developed in this show like our perspective change we become parents we've been married like there's

Starting point is 00:39:15 things happen in life and i think that's a it's a beautiful process for any kind of creative because you're going to start with a certain set of audience or fan base and over time you're going to keep some and you're going to lose some as you evolve. But to me, the most boring thing would be to stay the same and predictable. If you don't look back on your previous work as a creative and cringe a little bit, then there's something wrong, I think. If you can look back on your work from five years ago and not want to change anything about it, you haven't changed as a person.

Starting point is 00:39:42 I leave all of my old tweets and I leave all my my first few quote me books which are like snippy little quotes i leave a lot of stuff out there because i think it shows how much i've evolved and i'll read some of it or i'll go to like a book signing and people will bring copies of my old books and i'll flip through it and i'll see some of the stuff i wrote and i'll be like oh my god like that dude didn't know what the fuck he was talking our first episode still exists it is painful and i like having that out there i really do i like having it as to look back on and just feel better about what I'm doing now. My favorite thing in the world with everything I've realized, I wanted to put this as my job in my Instagram bio, but I won't, is to refine. It's like,

Starting point is 00:40:20 take what you've done and refine it and do it better. And then take what you've done and refine it and do it better. And that's the whole point is to refine as you go on. And it's like what you've done and refine it and do it better. And then take what you've done and refine it and do it better. And that's the whole point is to refine as you go on. And it's like what you said, if you look back five years ago and it's the same fucking thing, there's been no refinement, there's been no edits, there's been no elevation.

Starting point is 00:40:37 I like to look at- You're a boring person, like you were saying. I mean, if you look, I have friends of mine that I love them to death and they're good friends of mine, but they haven't changed in 10 years. And I find ourselves, we hang out less and less.

Starting point is 00:40:48 There's nothing to talk about. There was nothing in common. And I deeply want them to have some growth. And I want them to change who they are. And it's not that they're boring. I mean, I don't want to use that term to describe a friend. But the way they live their life is very boring. I don't mind if someone wants to stay the same.

Starting point is 00:41:05 If you want to stay the same, that's fine. But don't get mad at me for evolving. Or don't stay the same and complain about your life. Yes. And where I have a problem is when someone gets mad because I want to evolve and they think that I'm out of touch because I want to evolve because they don't.

Starting point is 00:41:23 Stay the same. If that's what you want to do, like do you. Don't get pissed at me. I look at any kind of creative outlet. Like when I think of an audience or a community or a fan base, whatever you want to call it, I try to think about it like, hey, it was great for a while, but I understand if we can't continue to go on the journey. It's like, you know, like breaking up with somebody you had a great relationship with.

Starting point is 00:41:43 It's like it was good while it lasted, but it's not going to carry forward. Some people are going to stay for forever and they're going to keep going and they're going to understand the involvement, but some people are only going to be able to go with you so far. I told Lauren when we first started dating, I said, there's going to be a subset of your friends that aren't going to be comfortable following you where you're going to go in life. Same with me, same with everybody else. It just happens. An easy example, I become a new dad and and a parent i can't be out on the guy's trip every fucking friday night running around in the nightclub but it's not well you don't even want to anymore like but like i if i if i if i go out past like midnight now and i'm drunk i'm like

Starting point is 00:42:15 fuck this is boring like i want to go home i can't even get him out of the house he's in bed at 5 30 but i can empathize with my friends that are still there and i can get like why they would not invite me at this point to those things i'm like dude i'm gonna suck compared like i'm like it's not gonna be fun i'm not gonna like do the things that i used to be able to do it just it's not it's not there for me anymore but i think this happens with everything you know and it's it's so funny like for people that are maybe not in a creative field of work we all can look back on an outfit that we wore five years ago thinking we were fucking stylish and be like oh my god what we're wearing it's the same thing for anyone that puts themselves out there in a creative outlet like your your opinions change you evolve your

Starting point is 00:42:53 style changes the things you're interested in change if you're not doing that you know what do you do i think when like you're saying one of the hardest things to do as a creative is do the same thing again like ever like you know my publisher even wanted me to write a follow-up to that history book and people are like when's volume two i could not get myself to write a second one i tried i thought oh i'll do it for the money i'll get a deal for it and i just can't do it it just bores the living hell out of me to do the same thing again there was some phenomenal i would say quote unquote kind of like business or like kind of self-help maybe category people that we had on this show early on when we were younger in our careers that like I love and cherish was they were amazing at the time,

Starting point is 00:43:28 but I can't do a thousand of those over and over. What I tell everyone that's listening is like those episodes still exist. You can always go back to them. But for me to do those constantly over and over and over, like I've just evolved past some of those conversations in my own life, right? Like I've taken what I needed from them and move forward. But I think sometimes people will get upset if it doesn't stay the same and it's not always in that same vein of content. I don't think anyone needs to apologize for evolving. What are some talking points that you're having right now online where people are agreeing, disagreeing, staying neutral? Give us what your content is. A lot of my talking points right now online are… Because right now I'm promoting this children's

Starting point is 00:44:04 book, William is a Weirdo, that I came out with. Such a cute name. talking points right now online are because right now i'm kind of promoting this children's book william is a weirdo that i came out with and such a cute name right that's really cute and i get it it gets a lot it's getting a lot of shit though because it's not it's not getting shit from my fan base it got shit from publishers and the reason i believe and i actually think i'm pretty spot on with this is because right now in America particularly and you'll appreciate this because your parents were not allowed to be weird anymore as kids like you can't look at something and just be oh that's weird like if your kid does something different it has to be like oh it's because they're this gender oh it's because they're following this

Starting point is 00:44:40 way like they look at everything and they have to try and label it immediately when it's just a kid being a kid, which is being weird. And being weird makes everyone successful. Anyone who's ever changed the world, anyone who's ever done something worth a damn has done so because they're weird in their own way. And so I just really wanted to bring the conversation back to being like, no, if your kid does this, it doesn't mean they're racist, or it doesn't mean they're this gender, or it doesn't mean they're trying to go this way politically. They're just being a kid, and they're being weird, and they're experimenting. Let them just be weird. Don't tell them it's a stepping stone to something they don't even comprehend right now. I believe that's why my children's book was rejected by every major publisher, because I've spent a lot of time in Barnes & Noble. I've spent a lot of time going

Starting point is 00:45:24 to bookstores, and I've looked at what's on the table. The way Barnes & Noble works is what's on the table is basically, it works like real estate. The publishers pay to have a six by 12 spot to put the books they want to promote on the tables. If you go into a Barnes & Noble, it's a very good sense of what the publishing world is trying to push at the time. In the children's section, it's books called anti-racist baby, or it's books about kids trying to find their gender. Those are real books, and it's almost all that. Anti-racist baby?

Starting point is 00:45:52 There's a book called Anti-Racist Baby. Kids are not racist. They're born so goddamn pure, that book doesn't even need to exist. But it does, and it's sold really well. And because my book doesn't fit into a political sphere like that, or because it was about

Starting point is 00:46:05 encouraging kids just to be weird, I think that's why it got rejected. And I actually asked a publisher, I said, off record, is this book being rejected because it doesn't fit into this political play right now? And without a doubt, not even a second, she said, absolutely. The Skinny Confidential Him and Her Show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Before we started talking to therapists and people that have been in therapy on this show, I always felt the subject was so overwhelming, so daunting. But then I realized that some of the world's best performers use therapy to enhance their

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Starting point is 00:51:03 We're doing an incredible job in this this country and i would argue in the world putting people's feelings ahead of how things really are and it's hurting people i mean you see listen i run a media business and we've made a very strong stance to basically let talent on this network say and do what they want to do how they want to do it right like that's basically from day one i'm not canceling anyone. I'm not cutting anyone. I don't care how controversial. I don't care if they say something that people dislike. That's the stance I've made. And I got a lot of shit for that for a while. I won't say from who, but that's just the political landscape we live in. But if you start to look at what's happening, the BuzzFeeds of the world,

Starting point is 00:51:39 the Vices of the world, all these companies that are- They're going out of business. Well, they're going out of business. They're going bankrupt because nobody... What I've seen, and I'm not going to even talk about specific properties or shows running this company and producing over a hundred different podcasts. I've seen all the analytics. Again, I won't talk specific. Anytime there's content that we've produced as a company that has been put out there to try to placate or fit into some political narrative, it has absolutely crumbled and fallen on its face. Every advertiser out there says, Hey, I need this kind of content. It doesn't land well. They pull their campaigns. They don't

Starting point is 00:52:08 actually support it. The audience that says they care so much about it never shows up. They never listen to it. They don't work. So I've said, hey guys, we've tried. I want to see if the audience responds. They don't. The advertisers want to see if they respond. They don't. You got to create stuff that people actually care about. If it stands out and it strikes a nerve, all the better. It's a good thing. We're doing a terrible disservice to everybody by constantly worrying about how people feel about things. I need to be able to share my opinion as somebody on a microphone without having to worry about how half of the population feels about it. It's my perspective. Some may disagree with it. Some may not like it. I'm not trying to offend anybody intentionally, but I can't walk around on landmines figuring out, does this thing

Starting point is 00:52:50 hurt someone's feelings? Does this thing not? You're teaching children to basically hide how they actually feel and how they actually think in a world that doesn't reward for that, right? And you're teaching the opposite of resilience. And my point is when I say the world doesn't reward for that is all these people that I've seen in these professional careers that try to play it safe from a creative standpoint or a content standpoint, it doesn't work. Their shows don't work. They don't get any attention. No advertiser wants to support it. Nobody's really listening. It doesn't fucking work. So maybe you've stayed in the middle and you feel good and you're not being quote unquote

Starting point is 00:53:22 canceled, but nobody fucking cares about you and nobody's listening to you. And so you don't, to your point earlier, you don't have to go out and create a bunch of content to be divisive, but you have to go out and actually share your real opinion and how you really feel about things and actually live how you really are as opposed to just trying to fit in some political narrative because it doesn't fucking work. And honestly, now as running a company that's done a lot of this stuff, nobody fucking cares. I think the biggest loss in society right now is the loss of the individual. I think everyone is trying to be, not trying to be, I think the larger conversation right now is trying to put labels on everything because it makes life more predictable. And it kind of comes back to what you were saying earlier about trying to hyper

Starting point is 00:54:02 control your life. A lot of people are anxious right now a lot of people are depressed a lot of people are stressed and they feel if they have more control of their life it's gonna help them deal with those emotions and if they can make the world more predictable in the sense of like oh i know what that person i know what they stand for because because they said this one statement i know they're a democrat or they said that once i know they're republican it's easier to put people in the boxes because it makes life easier to intake and so i think the individual and just the sense of like surprise and just going through life understanding that not everything's gonna be your way is being lost right now it's also it's also easier for people to say hey my life's not

Starting point is 00:54:42 the way i want it because of some external thing and they'll put a label on it and they'll blame that for their reasoning. When really, I think the majority of it comes back to accepting responsibility for everything in your life. And a lot of people, some of the content I write, and I hate calling it content. I hate that I even use that word. I think content is a disservice to creatives. Some of the stuff I write that gets the most blowback is stuff that is meant to be empowering to people. With personal accountability attached to it.

Starting point is 00:55:11 Yes, because people, they feel like it's not correctly addressing their trauma or their past. The hardest part about taking accountability for your life is accepting the fact that all the stuff that sucks in it, you might be responsible for. And it's a very uncomfortable feeling for people. So they just, they push away from that kind of stuff.

Starting point is 00:55:32 There's this topic that everyone's talking about, which is Ozempic or whatever it's called, the semi-glutide. That's like the diet. Yeah, the diet stuff. And it's traditionally been a diabetes medicine and I'm not a doctor and I say all that, but it's interesting because you say that I shared my perspective that I think that people that partake in that unnecessarily just for an aesthetic to lose weight are doing themselves a long-term disservice. That's starting now actually to be medically proven in multiple cases. But my thought was if you find something

Starting point is 00:55:59 that gives you an easy out that enables you to not put in any more work to better your life, it's just like, hey, I can take this thing now and I don't have to eat right and I don't have to work out. The long-term effect of that is you're going to become more complacent, more lazy, and potentially have worse health complications down the line, maybe losing muscle mass, hair, et cetera. And the amount of people that got angry about that, when my message was really like, hey, instead of doing that, maybe think about eating right and going to the gym and getting better sleep and doing that first before you resort to it. Of course, there's some people that are going to need it because they have a certain medical condition. But if you're

Starting point is 00:56:29 an average person that's looking to lose 15, 20, 30 pounds, there's some other ways that are much harder. They're going to be more challenging, but in the long run, it's going to empower you in a much better way. People get so mad about that message. Yeah. Before you even went down that train of thought, my immediate reaction was there's no reward. There's no reward of putting in hard work. I think that's one of the greatest thing about writing books is they're so fucking hard. Even simple books are very personal and you put yourself out there and it's easy to try and disconnect from your work, but everything you do is a bit of yourself in it. It's so rewarding when you work on something for so long and have people write you stuff saying it changed their life. Or with this book, Speech Therapy,

Starting point is 00:57:08 I've had thousands of people write me and say, I was having a really hard day. This book pulled me out of depression. This book helped me when my boyfriend cheated on me. This book helped me. The fact that I was able to do that is far more rewarding than any short way out. And that's why I don't understand with a lot of, you see it now with a lot of public figures, they use ghostwriters. I don't know that I could even accept the praise on my book if a ghostwriter worked on it. It could be hard for me to even do press and know that someone else wrote my book. I understand if you're not like the best writer and a ghostwriter helps you kind of hone your arguments, but I know ghostwriters. I have a lot of friends that ghostwrite and they'll write entire books for people that the other person really has no say in but the other person slaps their name on

Starting point is 00:57:49 it and now they're considered an entrepreneur expert and they're charging ten thousand dollars a month for their their classes when really they didn't think of anything in that fucking book and I don't I don't know how people can do that and feel good about it extreme ownership yeah jaco that's his book right yes extreme ownership i'm reading um david goggins book too and i feel like he's all about that goggins books are fantastic so i actually i liked his first book i listened to his first book at a time when i kind of needed that i haven't got to the second book so don't ruin anything that's not ruining anything i'm almost done with the first the first book i think was the hard talk i needed at the time okay the second book made me respect david on a whole new level what's the differences between the book without he's much more vulnerable in the second book okay the second

Starting point is 00:58:34 book's not so just rah rah fuck your bitch voice kind of stuff like the second the second book is like he actually comes at it from a human perspective and it has the empathy that i feel the world needs right now. I think there's a time and place for harsh talk. And I think if it's done correctly, it's very effective. But you have to maintain some empathy that I think was missing in that first book. But after the second one, I became a whole different fan of his. I mean, that just rounds out the whole conversation about evolving.

Starting point is 00:59:00 He evolved. Yeah, he very much, he acknowledges it in the book too, which I appreciated i appreciated well i think brute strength and that mentality gets you far to a certain point but you can't do that for the rest of your life it's too it's not sustainable it's hyper control so we talked about the hat that kind of mentality is hyper control it's like controlling everything i get up at 4 a.m every day i make my bed and by 407 i'm drinking coffee and then i'm out running fuck all you guys like that kind of stuff i think as a person wears you down and it just, it doesn't allow you to connect with the world or others around you in the way you need to, to have a fulfilling life. Have you ever heard of Doc Amon?

Starting point is 00:59:33 He's a, he does brain scans. But anyways, I think like for the longest time I was probably brute strength, brute mentality type of person. Like just do get up, do the thing blinders on, not worry about the effect. There's don't worry about sleep, all that. And I just went and sat with him. He's also a therapist. And he was like, listen, my brain and the pattern and the way I think is tied to some

Starting point is 00:59:52 kind of trauma that I haven't addressed probably from the past. And I was thinking, you can only push for so long just using that toolbox. And at some point, you have to, and I'm working on it now, you have to go back and think about why you do things and the patterns that you have in your life and like why you come to the conclusions you come to and if you if you if you don't do that i think you can only get so far so like i'm in the process of like what is that kind of trauma i don't necessarily know maybe it's something i've blocked but i got to figure out what it is in order to move forward he's working on his emotional flexibility i got a good book for you so my my hyper control came from my

Starting point is 01:00:24 religious upbringing feeling like i didn't have control of my life or my fate. You know, I was told that if I did this or that, I was going to go to heaven or hell. Like that made me feel very out of control. And then when I left that world, I tried to hyper control everything. And I became very much like militant, you know, with my mindset. And then I read a book called the mastery of self by Don Miguel Ruiz Jr. And that's, uh, the four agreements. So it's the son of the man who wrote the four agreements. This is the, okay. So not the four. And that's the Four Agreements. So it's the son of the man who wrote the Four Agreements. This is the, okay, so not the Four Agreements,

Starting point is 01:00:47 it's the son? Four Agreements is Don Miguel Ruiz. The Mastery of Self is by Don Miguel Ruiz Jr., which is his son. And it's about kind of mastering yourself as a person. But he talks about

Starting point is 01:00:56 what you're talking about and he calls it the parasite. And there's a parasite in all of us that is the negative talk. And the parasite is what makes us feel we have to have that militant level of discipline in our life because it tells us we're not good enough.

Starting point is 01:01:08 And just kind of acknowledging it as that way made me look at it very different. Because like a parasite, it comes into a host and it kind of takes over and drains from the host and kind of wants certain things. That's what the parasitic mind's doing to you.

Starting point is 01:01:20 And so that book, when anybody asks me which book has changed my life more than anything, it's probably The Mastery of Self. And then the, what's it called the victor frankel book man's search for meaning that's an incredible book those two books like blew my world apart when i read them at the times i read them is when i needed to read them but the mastery of self i think with your kind of mind i think you're very similar to me in the sense it was a control thing yeah very similar to how i was in my 20s. That book really did a lot for me.

Starting point is 01:01:45 Speaking of Man's Search for Meaning, anytime you feel bad for yourself in life, if you read that book, even if you read 20, 30, 40 pages of that book, you'll immediately have a perspective shift. That book will change your world. I think the hard part is people have this idea of, oh, it could always be worse. And they say, okay, but that doesn't actually acknowledge the fact that what I'm going through still sucks. I think when you're reading a book like that, it's important to acknowledge the fact it could be worse

Starting point is 01:02:10 because the people that were in those Holocaust camps probably lived the most atrocious thing imaginable. But it doesn't mean your life doesn't still suck too or you can't still have things that are hard. And I think that's what people need to understand is it's good to look at those as references, but also acknowledge the fact that you can still have sucky things too. I love this episode.

Starting point is 01:02:28 This is a great episode. Can we give away your books signed? Yes, absolutely. Okay, you guys, all you have to do is tell us your favorite takeaway from this episode on my latest post at Lauren Bostic and then follow. At SGRSTK on Instagram. If you type in the captain or kyle creek it'll come up but it's always been that handle so in college i had a cloning line called sugar steak this i've

Starting point is 01:02:51 actually i've actually never explained this before really fucking funny i had i've never told people where the handle came from so i had i was doing like little t-shirt graphics called sugar steak and it was like you know a piece of ice cream with the steak on like really goofy stuff and i had the handles when i started using instagram i just like fuck it already had the handle and i never changed it and every time i do like book signings people ask me what it is and i don't i refuse to answer the question you still have any of those shirts i do actually so i had someone show up to a book signing in austin wearing one it was a shirt i made like 13 years ago wow and he was like i've been a fan of yours ever since this clothing brand you know back in the day and it

Starting point is 01:03:23 was just that honestly probably hit me more than anyone I've met at a book signing because the fact that he stuck around for that many years. And I told him, I was like, I'm honestly surprised you stuck around that long because I've become so many different people over that decade and more. The fact that you still support where my life goes, that means a lot to me. I'm sure. Yeah. I think that you guys will love his books.

Starting point is 01:03:45 Speech Therapy, 52 Pick Me Ups to Get You Through Many of Life's What the Fucks and Fucking History. And then William is a Weirdo. That children's book

Starting point is 01:03:54 is pre-ordered now at williamisaweirdo.com. I'm already ordering it. Thank you. I'm ordering that. That sounds like an incredible book. Yeah, my dad actually

Starting point is 01:04:02 illustrated it. That's the cool thing. It's so cute. So growing up, my mom was my editor for a long time. She's an English major. Yeah, my dad actually illustrated it. That's the cool thing is my dad and I did it. Oh, that is so cute. So growing up, my mom was my editor for a long time. She's an English major. She used to write books herself. And then my dad's always been an illustrator.

Starting point is 01:04:14 And so my dad and I worked together on William. We've been working on it for over a year. So my dad didn't do those illustrations. But William is a weirdo my dad illustrated. And a lot of it's kind of like the weird things I had in my own life as a kid, the weird things my dad did, the weird things my girlfriend did. kind of like combined it into one character and made this goofy little you know redheaded kid with a pet squid that is so cute thank you i love it you guys go follow kyle kyle thank you for coming on come back next time you're in austin absolutely thanks for having me or we'll see you yeah come visit me in florida yeah we'll

Starting point is 01:04:44 come visit you. It was between here and Florida, really, like when we looked and we did the analysis, but it was just a little bit far. Like I was like too far. Maybe, you know what? You never know. Same thing. I was thinking of moving to Texas,

Starting point is 01:04:53 but what I like about Florida is you're really close to like New York and stuff. But also I find I'm much more productive on the East Coast time zone because when I get up at five or six, I feel like I'm living in the future. Yeah, it is crazy. If you get up at five or six in LA, if I'm living in the future. Yeah, it is crazy. If you get up at five or six in LA,

Starting point is 01:05:06 if you have a career like ours where people are reaching out to you from all over the world. You're reactive. Like the people are in New York are already awake and you're already getting emails and you're already getting texts.

Starting point is 01:05:14 But if you wake up that early on the East Coast, everyone's fucking asleep. And it just makes you feel like you're ahead of the curve. We're closer to your time zone. Yeah, I think we're like an hour difference or something.

Starting point is 01:05:23 We're two hours from California. It is a game changer though being ahead of the west coast it's incredible so you gotta go all the way to the east coast it'll completely change maybe i should just move to paris that's that's one where can everyone find your book you all the things you just go to amazon and search speech therapy or fucking history or if you just type in the captain or kyle creek on instagram you'll find me and there's links to everything there. Thank you, Kyle.

The Skinny Confidential Him & Her Podcast - How To Build Your Character, Battle Depression, Speak Your Truth, & Evolve Ft. Kyle Creek AKA "The Captain"

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