Mormon Stories 1430: Redefining Masculinity - Lance Allred

hello everyone and welcome to another edition of mormon stories podcast i'm your host john dillin it is april 26th 2021 and today i am super excited to have back on mormon stories podcast uh a familiar face to me and hopefully to some of you uh today i'm bringing back none other than lance allred hey lance it's good to be back john thanks for having me so great to have you so uh those of you who have been long-time mormon stories podcast fans will remember lance i had him on several years ago um lance came from a fundamentalist mormon background as the grandson of uh the founder of the rulon allred of the allred group which is one of the main uh fundamentalist offshoots he was raised in montana he was born deaf super tall and eventually he he became a college basketball player played at the university of utah under rick majerus and then he had a goal of becoming a professional basketball player he played for both the cleveland cavaliers with lebron james and for the indiana pacers but he also had like a 10-year uh a professional basketball career playing all around the world yeah lots of fun places and uh that's just the beginning because he also is the author of four or five books some of the books include long shot the adventures of a deaf fundamentalist mormon kid and his journey to the nba uh basketball gods the transformation of the enlightened jock and um recently a couple years ago he gave a tedx talk at salt lake city or university of utah tedx it's got between three and four million views now yeah um received really well it's one of the best i think most viewed ted talks to ever come out of kind of mormonism or fundamentalist mormonism called what is your polygamy and then he went on to write a book called how to give the million view tedx talk what is your polygamy so uh he's a mover to shaker he's also a public speaker he travels around the country and i'm guessing world uh as a paid a motivational speaker and the reason why we brought him on more missouri's podcast today is because right before covid he came out with an exciting book i'm going to hold it up here the book is called the new alpha male how to win the game when the rules are changing by lance allred and the way that i heard about this book i i've been a fan of lance's for some time but somehow this book hadn't really caught my attention my wife margie was listening to a podcast that lance had appeared on where he was talking about this book and uh you know recently i did an episode on unlearning mormon misogyny you know we know that we come out of a patriarchy those of us who have left mormonism or are still in it either in a patriarchy or have come out of a patriarchy you know our our culture uh our modern culture for the past several millennia if not for the entire human evolution existence has been informed and informed by and based in rooted in patriarchy and as 21st century humans we're trying to figure out a better way and when when we are raised in a patriarchy um when patriarchy is all we know it's like the water we're swimming in and men develop all sorts of toxic traits it's a term that's often referred to as toxic masculinity and it's not just a mormon thing it's a human thing but it's definitely in mormonism and just because you may stop believing in orthodox mormonism and or leave the mormon church that doesn't mean that you have all the sudden become enlightened and lost all the misogynistic conditioning that you were raised with and so what we have to do is figure out you know what does it mean to be a man and it's even more complicated because now we have not only men and women but we're in a society where non-traditional gender identities are also emerging like gender non-binary people transgender people so gender is kind of being discussed and let's just say challenged and or abandoned not that gender isn't important but that what if we could have a more evolved um sophisticated and enlightened approach to understanding gender and specifically what i want to focus on today is how can those of us who identify as male or as men how can we again unlearn some of this toxic masculinity and misogyny and have a rebirth of what it means to be a man in a way that's more enlightened and i have read i'm going to admit it i've read half of this book uh literally half i've got half to go but i've read enough of it i think to be able to have a really good at least starting conversation with lance and then what i hope to do is to convince lance to start a podcast where he um just just uh you know begins becoming a public voice uh for helping men learn to do and be better and there's so much wisdom in this book and i mean brene brown type level wisdom uh that uh i think you know men i hope you will not turn this off and i hope men you will listen because i believe that lance has a lot to help us with so without any further ado lance allred what would you say in reaction to that introduction anything you want to correct uh no a lot of a lot of things i wanted to interject because obviously my brain's going off on tangents you covered a lot and so thank you for that intro and um this is an honor for me to have this conversation with you because you and i share many similar archetypes the philosopher um and even the peaceful warrior archetype that you have that it's not necessarily your intellect that is what was threatening to mormon leadership when they excommunicated you it was your heart the peaceful warrior archetype that you move around with that you championing other people moving with compassion and empathy and that's a hard thing to do in this world where anyone can puff their chest and be bravado that's not hard to do at all walk into a bar 10 guys are ready to puff their chest to step up to you because you're big i don't go to clubs because i'm big i get tired of people stepping up to me it's not hard to do what is difficult to do because you and i we're not socially conditioned to do is actually empathetically put ourselves in another person's shoes and walk a mile in their shoes and try to see life through their lens that is a very difficult thing to do especially in patriarchy and here's how i will sum up patriarchy with one word scarcity that is the general energetic theme of patriarchy there's not enough for everyone to go around so therefore that is a threat with compassion compassion if i move in scarcity and patriarchy means if i give someone compassion they're going to take advantage of me and exploit me and take from me and so you moving around with the peaceful warrior archetype let's talk about the power of compassion because it's one of the seven principles of perseverance that i have in the book that talks about the new alpha and i know new alpha male is triggering and i did not choose the title my publishers both women chose the title because when someone's triggered that actually is the easiest entry point for them to do some self-reflection and healing and growth and i know that will turn a lot of women off they think this is a book about rava bravado but at some point you brought in as a book for men but also as a book for women women moving into leadership positions which is high time and necessary for that to happen but also for women to understand and hold space for their husbands sons brothers understanding how much work it is required of us to break away from cold war america social conditioning that said my masculinity is directly attached to my trophies how many nuclear weapons and guns that i have all those symbolic metrics that we were taught meant that i had arrived or i was an alpha so therefore the skill of going inward the skill of self-reflection was not something we were taught not just in mormonism but across the board america but in mormonism especially moving to the first principle of perseverance which is accountability corporate keynote level accountability i tell people the buck stops with me i never use my hearing as an excuse when i was playing basketball i wasn't going to give people the satisfaction of that but deeper accountability is asking yourself tough questions why do i feel guilt because i got caught or because i lied to my wife why or am i afraid of abandonment from my community why do we feel these feelings of guilt and shame is it to belong or is it because i'm not in alignment with my core true authentic self that is what a new alpha male accountability is being able to sit and have uncomfortable conversations with yourself and asking what really is driving me and more importantly what stories if you remember from our first interview i know i'm going on a tangent here it's good i love it um i had the story that god was angry with me and he was punishing me and gave me the punishment of deafness for being unfaithful in the pre-existence it was impressed upon me when i was five years old that is a story things do happen to us that's not in question what is in question is which archetype is narrating the story the victim the martyr the saboteur the child the child archetype and if you pay attention to these languages we'll get into archetypes later but that is what i mean by accountability and being able from our mormon upgrading background instead of just saying i'm doing this because this is what i was told is convenient this is what the prophet told me to do and surface level accountability is i'm following the rules to stay in a system that's surface level accountability deeper accountability is asking why do i want to be in the system yeah tough question to ask because at the basic human level we want to feel we belong somewhere yeah yeah and i um i love it that you started out by talking about kind of by acknowledging there's going to be some discomfort in this conversation yes using the term alpha male is going to be triggering for some people and for many men talking about toxic masculinity and patriarchy and misogyny is like an automatic turn-off yes and then talking about accountability that's important because men have privilege we do we do we have had privilege for millennia and we have had uh a greater share of the power and that has led to uh frankly marginalized groups yes uh physically weaker groups being harmed and so man i just want to i just want to say this is this is uncomfortable this is going to be triggering maybe at times and again i love it that you're saying this isn't just for men because this is this is very important for everyone women too that that we all learn because a woman let's just say a woman's ascending the corporate ladder a woman could learn from male role models yes and emulate uh misogyny and patriarchy exactly as women yes and so it's something that you know patriarchy hurts everybody yes patriarchy hurts women and it hurts men and it and um and and so let me let me though just jump back there's a lot of people that won't have you know we have had a lot of listeners since joined since i interviewed you yeah and um and there's a lot of listeners that kind of drop off so if you can just tell us enough about your story but specifically what led to you wanting to write a book because i you know here here's how i ask the question oh man you already played for the nba um you're a professional basketball player for 10 years and now you're a successful motivational speaker you could be talking about hey i used to play with lebron james hey i was a professional athlete like you could ride that ticket all the way into the sunset why would you ever want to wade into the culture wars of toxic masculinity misogyny like that's those are landmines that many men are just afraid to even um wait in so tell us enough about your story to help us understand why you wanted to do this um i will go into my story briefly just let me have a little quick input yes man i've been in control but we also need to understand the compassion and give men compassion and understanding that in this system we're designed to be in control and so therefore we have to follow a formula and if we don't have power that means that we are not man enough so that's terrifying for men to move into the space of like wait if you're taking away the system that i am being told that i have to ascend the system that's been tailor-made for me to ascend and you're telling me the system is flawed as all systems eventually erode anyway as to the law of entropy that would be terrifying for men so just to validate what you said this is uncomfortable conversations but this is what is required of alpha status to be able to do difficult things and have uncomfortable conversations that's why it's called alpha anyone can puff their chest that's not hard to do again that's not an alpha thing to do to be able to sit and have very very uncomfortable conversations that uproot your entire facade of your identity difficult things to do and i appreciate anyone listening and hanging in there with you and me with this conversation going into my arc the story being born and raised in a polygamous commune of extreme mormon fundamentalism uh where alpha was you know having six seven eight wives and you know imagine that still being a subconscious story embedded to me that we break away my family my father blows a whistle on child abuse and money laundering we break away when i'm 13. um that even then if i can't keep one woman happy what does that say about me as a man when my grandfather could keep seven women happy you know you say you got married and divorced yes okay yeah all those things and so that's me jumping ahead but that's something that is just going i'm trying to create context of how much that amplified my status as a man in that world is directly tied to the woman i marry how many women i marry that is a reflection of my alphabet that's how you were raised exactly that's how i was raised so that is the extreme culture that i'm coming from showing extreme patriarchy yeah and i had the hearing loss due to rh factor my mother was a negative blood type i was positive so her body was killing me off as i was as a parasite and so when i was born i was nearly dead and very lucky to be alive but there were no amenities to learn sign language in montana at that time in the 1980s so i had to be taking the speech therapy three times a week i was a speech therapy tells 13 to learn to speak this way and when we broke away from polygamy at 13 i never i didn't play basketball my father was a theologian the doctrinaire the scholar and so we were taught to be basically it was a seminary house is what it was and my but my father was a baseball prodigy when he was a kid but he gave a baseball to fulfill his father's dream as rulin uh wanted him to to expand the utopian dream of pinesdale montana and all that and so breaking away from polygamy losing all my cousins who are my best friends uh i we then moved to downtown salt lake city where i grew that year from eighth grade and from 5 10 to 6'4 coach saw me walking down the hall said come play ball i'm like sure i don't have any friends it'll be a good way to fit in and so i wasn't very good at first but which high school is this there was there was bryan intermediate high school right next to east high school and then i went to east and um we should say we we've interviewed your dad vance already yeah stories as well you can pause this go back and listen to my interview with vance and yeah come back vance was a high school history teacher right at alta at alta high school out to high school and um so little by little though basketball was a great segue for me to belong to something again because i came out of extreme belonging having my cousins around me constant blood buzz now basketball still allowed me to segue into something while i was socially uh arrested development socially that again i didn't have any social skills very shy integrated with my speaking my hearing and when you're raised that you're god's chosen people and your elite because of your bloodline you don't really work on developing social skills and so having to learn all that luckily i could do it through basketball and i had my teammates to kind of tolerate me at times and help me learn and grow and they were so patient with me and i loved so much gratitude for all of them and then uh gatorade player of the year for state of utah 1999 went to committed to utah the year they lost to kentucky the national championship game in 1998 played for rick majerus uh one year was good second year was a tough year and didn't work out um won't go into all that story then transfer the weber state talk about that in my interview yeah i talked about that it's interesting it is i mean but it goes to show just the gladiator yeah talk some actually but the gladiator arena that is sports that people don't care about your feelings you are not you when you're an athlete bleed sweat die if you have to but entertain me and as long as you're winning games we won't question how you're doing it as long as you're winning and that is pure patriarchy at its best and uh then went to weber state and so climbing the sports world having gone sideways with coach majerus and dealing with some black ball inc but then redeeming myself at weber state led the nation in rebounding most of the year with andrew bogut that was he was a great player paul millsap great player we were battling for that i was not drafted out of weber went and played overseas then went to the minor leagues with drafting in the nba i was called up at the age of 27 so seven years longer than the average rookie finally made the nba became the first legally deaf player in the nba couldn't play with my hearing aids and so i had to learn to play basketball in different ways much more intuitive keeping my head on a swivel swivel being much more visually based and so the answer your question to sum it all up why am i not the ravrah chase your dreams american dream motivational speaker because i followed that dream like the movies told us to and i had the story deep embedded even though we'd broken away from polygamy that there's god was still angry with me and if i had to do something stupid human that i'd be worthy of love not just from god but from a woman too and i got to the nba and my self-worth was nowhere to be found is that possible that you think you're playing with it with lebron james sure you're getting paid a lot of money you've reached the dream that everyone reaches you think you're just feeling like a million bucks self-actualized your thing you think it's self-actualized but it's not because your ego's happy but at the heart you're still walking around in fear and scarcity that everyone around you is terrified of losing their job and you see how political it really is when there's that much money involved of course is political yeah and so you want to believe as a pure merit-based system but when it becomes that political it becomes like any other corporate job and i thought once i got there i would have my crescendo of happily ever after music like the movie showed us but the movies never show us what happens the day after and i still felt fear and i shot i was for my first point in the nba i was shooting a free throw in front of 16 000 people and the thought came in my head and it was is this it i don't feel any different you didn't feel amazing didn't feel amazing why not just because you we've been taught especially with mormonism that there's this fairy tale happily ever after and disenchantment comes whether you get the dream or you don't get the dream that's part of growing up and moving into self-actualization when you realize i did everything the system told me to and i still don't know who the hell i am i'm just a character in the system story and i can either kill myself which i nearly did a year later really yeah what were you feeling because the economy hit in 2008 and the bubble burst and i was released from and i was yeah the cavaliers okay and then i was over in italy and they weren't paying i'm like i did everything i was supposed to do what happened where did it go wrong that i was not getting confirmation bias that is strong in mormon culture that mormon is mormonism even with all of its fairy tales and mysticism if you study enough theology mormonism is one of the most linear left brain religions in the world x plus y equals z i have to get baptized go on a mission get married in the temple and then i'll get to go to the 10th degree of glory in the celestial kingdom very formulaic left-brained system-based and so when people follow the formula and life just works out their way they're able to say the system works that's called confirmation bias people like you and me who also are heart centered people very philosophical but in our empathy in our big hearts we meet people and you traveling around the world who aren't mormon i'm like wait how can i say that they're less than me but they're wonderful people too bad they don't get their hair and go to heaven which is complete arrogance in hubris that alone is already rattling my world but i'm still following the system and i get there and i expect eternal bliss and things are going to work out great from there and then it all comes crashing down and in that moment confirmation buyers was gone that i'm like okay i did everything the system told me to do where did it go wrong either god's still angry with me and punishing me and who wants to live that way or the system is flawed and the system isn't really what it says to be and if that's true who the hell am i those are scary questions to be asking yourself when you're all by yourself in a hotel room in italy 10 floors up with no internet no tv and you read all the books you can to distract yourself and the pain of reality not meeting your expectations and i had a choice in that moment john i can die with my stories where my stories can die story is what i mean by story the story is just a perspective i never challenge what actually happens to people but i do challenge which archetype is narrating the story the victim the victim language is this why does this always happen to me oh this is happening again people always leave martyr says i don't deserve to be happy and have all my dreams come true at the same time god doesn't want that for me child says i need someone or something else to fulfill me or complete me saboteur says i don't deserve this why do i get to be have this rather than someone else the survival archetypes that call young talks about we all have those archetypes and so i was living my first 30 years in a very child martyr victim way that that's how i make sense of the world god is far away he's outside somewhere and i have to do all these things to earn his love and then i'll be completed from some external experience some external trophy like the american dream teaches us once i get that mba reward i will in fact be fulfilled and validated but i will tell you this this disenchantment that i felt every nba player goes through it and that's the thing that's that's the great oxymoron of life again clarity comes in spite of our dreams whether you get them or don't get your dreams there's a disenchantment that has a necessary rite of passage as you go through the transformation into self-actualization that is asking yourself who am i really and who do i choose to be going forward from that what what what you're reminding me of are the the documentaries i've seen about like michael jackson or whitney houston or you know that you know you know about prince the musician like all these musicians that literally were on top of the world had that fame money power notoriety they were loved and they all die of like drug overdoses and you're like what what in the world they're the ones that should be the happiest but in addition to like the normal lived experience which is in and of itself fraught and problematic it's got to be super hard to be playing at you know whatever what's the arena cleveland cover quicken loans play it play in a quicken loans arena one year and then the next year you're at some random hotel in italy yeah coming off that big high that's got to be super hard to have once tasted oh yeah such highs here's here's the great uh internal war though is when i'm there i don't even like being there i don't like the reason why i love the last dance documentary that came out michael jordan it finally showed people just how political and petty it really is yeah behind the scenes yeah so when people say why weren't you happy in the nba i'm like now you can watch the documentary and you see scotty pippen yeah it's not all milk and honey thomas it's it's really it's even michael jordan in that video he talks about how he could never go anywhere yeah so he just stayed in his hotel room yeah and like watch tv because he couldn't go out in public and so even that life you're like okay i'm not even fulfilled but at least i'm here my ego wants to be here because people still know my name they look at me they wanted to be around me they want my autograph or whatnot and then suddenly you're in italy you're like well i don't want to be here either where the hell do i want to be and so can i ask one last thing yeah also the traits that were required of you to make you successful as an athlete yeah i'm wondering if they served you well as a human that's a really good question and those are things i've had to learn to this is when we talk about integrity in just a minute learning to integrate the athlete talk about what you what traits you needed to be a successful athlete that maybe didn't serve you and then we could talk about yeah what you have to swap them for to quickly go back what i just summed up that is the arc in my life and story yeah and sounds true the publisher and macmillan know that's my story and they thought this is a perfect person to address the issue of the hollowness of toxic masculinity and patriarchy to someone who's been inside the belly of the beast they can actually say what really is there now going to the traits that are needed you have to be cutthroat you have to not only are they what traits traits to be required to be an athlete at the professional level okay okay yeah yes thank you tracer required to be an athlete at the professional level you have to be able to be merciless and cut throat though not only do i want to outscore my opponent i actually want to make him homeless not only do i want to have him lose the game i want to have him sent to the bench i want to have him lose his job i want to have him be homeless that's how cold and cruel you have to be to be a professional athlete really yeah you think most people most athletes have yeah when you're going to get someone on the court that's how much visceral um disdain there is that if you're really i mean it's one thing to play against your friend but like when jordan and barkley were going at each other it wasn't like oh they were laughing and patting each other on their ass when they were playing the game they wanted to destroy each other but off the court they could be friends but when you step on the court there is an almost psychosis that has to happen for you to even have a fighting chance to survive because not only is the person in front of you literally trying to do the same thing to you you got teammates that want your job you got coaches who are worried about their job and so everyone is living in complete fear there is no trust and yet everyone's trying to sell this concept of team but when you know coach coach is just waiting for a better job opportunity he'll go to the next job as well yeah he's spouting all these cliches about teamwork and you like [ __ ] coach we see right through you we're all here for the same thing everyone's trying to get theirs and move on that's corporate culture yeah and that's what happens when you bring money into the game of basketball and so in that world i had to learn so before i was a basketball player i was a writer my parents taught me to read and write as a kid i was winning the writing awards in elementary school and then suddenly i became a basketball player and only [ __ ] is right so that was a huge part of myself that i had to hide from the world the poet the philosophers the thinkers with the hearing loss i've always been very empathetic watching people's body language and their words words can lie but the body never lies i learned that very early on so as a basketball player i can look on the court and see who's afraid to even touch the ball before they even get it just by their body language and the way they walk where their toes are pointed what tells me a lot body never lies but those are things about myself that i had to cut off and in that denial of my authentic self that's where the hole in your heart is formed that's where you think this i feel empty because there are a huge archetypes within me the poet uh the philosopher the sensitive self that i am denying and therefore i'm expecting some trophy or some woman outside of me to come in and complete that fill that void because this world is not a safe enough place not just a basketball court but this world is not a safe enough place to let that sensitive side be shown because in patriarchy someone will then come and exploit me or at least that's what patriarchy says will happen is it necessarily true no so these are the things we have to question and ask ourselves and moving into integrity integrity is my second principle of perseverance it's probably my favorite one my parents pushed a lot of buttons in polygamy because they treated everyone exactly the same you would think wait it's a polygamous social commune everyone's treated exactly the same right no humans are pack animals there's hierarchy in patriarchy even a socialist patriarchy and yet whether you were an already a jessup or a white or davis it didn't matter to my parents they treated everyone the same and people loved them for that and they also became a threat to people in power who were not authentic people people who like many coaches when the cameras are armed or mr charming but behind closed doors mr hyde and we've all had bosses or religious leaders or parents like that even though once sunday comes they're all smiley at church but come home they're nightmares or we've all been that yeah we've all been that absolutely say what you want to about bobby knight but he was grumpy on camera grumpy off camera that's integrity and there is integrity in that because you know what you're getting and that is what i tell people when you're in a leadership position and you're changing your personality depending on who's in the room that's how i define integrity are you the same person in every room that you are that you walk into sure you might be the student or the teacher a different archetype but by being the same people person i mean i'm asking are you treating everyone exactly the same and are you consistent in your character and are you integrated and i was not integrated as an athlete because i was separate i was living a schism the athlete on the court nice guy which we'll talk about in a minute off the court so you were a double person double person i was not living in integrity yeah completely polarized it was your job description you had to be that way it had to be and very clear from my parents one day i came home with the athlete attitude and my parents grounded me for two weeks and said that person does not get to come here and so i was taught even as a child cutthroat lance that everyone loves to root for and cheer for as a proxy for our community a rep for our community go for their throat make them bleed destroy them but once the lights turn off when you come home you have to be lance you have to be nice lance you have to be the prince you have to be the nice guy and let's talk about the nice guy the nice guy mormons are a quintessential nice people nice guys are the most dishonest people in the world what do i mean by that they never tell you exactly what they feel they only tell you what they think you want to hear and i was really good at that knowing what people wanted to hear from me and i would tell them what they wanted to hear even if it was against my true self complete disregard for me and so by that metric mormons are very dishonest people wait no we're taught you can't tell a lie right but when you're fake and you're completely nice to people that you gossip about to their face that is dishonest and not living in integrity and so when i went and played in japan i remember people warned me oh the japanese they're the nicest [ __ ] in the world i'm like oh these are my people then i get it i speak the language i come from that kind of culture where we never tell people exactly how we feel or what we really think just keep the peace keep everything surface level so mormons are don't know how to have intimacy not i know i'm thinking blanket this isn't blanket true but as a culture mormons are not taught how to have intimacy and how is that hurting you in your personal life living kind of that double life how is that hurting you that everything has to be perfect everything has to be clean everything has to be silver linings for example here's how a mormon will serve a line to me if i'm going through a divorce as a single father oh but at least you got your kid out of it thank you [ __ ] i know i got my kid out of it and it really still and it hurts it still hurts and then i had another friend former mormon able to say yeah i've been there and it really sucks it just sucks man and being able to sit with me just sit with me in my grief and let me grieve mormons are afraid of the grief process yes oh go shed tears for a day at the funeral but then oh count your blessings you'll see him in heaven everything's going to be great don't grieve for too long let's fast forward this process failing to understand that the grief cycle is probably the most powerful right of passage that we can go through as human beings something that i know you've gone through as well in the grief and the death and the rebirth of who is john as a mormon now excommunicated mormon thy grieving cycle a death of rebirth that you had to go through and so as mormons uncomfortable conversations about real human emotions grief despair abandonment fear things that make us all really uncomfortable like oh well do you try praying harder maybe just go to church and everything will be okay let's just keep it clean and so i live a very compartmentalized life cutthroat lance on the court nice guy lance off the court but then also packing it down and avoiding your emotions and being not intentionally fake not just playing a role exactly you were taught to play that always has a dark side whenever you're packing your emotions down whenever you're avoiding whenever you're not putting up boundaries that protect you yes you're hurting yourself but then also the emotional reaction to always avoiding and packing down your feelings it erupts absolutely in ways that hurts other people so it hurts everyone when you're not integrated that is the that is the quintessential symptom of nice guy yeah eruption yeah that eventually even on the court as a teammate in the locker room i was a nice guy and i played the role as a team captain nice guy lance just dealing with it dealing with it taking it all in being a nice guy until eventually i'd blow up and then people would say oh my gosh lance the betrayal where did nice guy last go wow you betrayed me you hurt my feelings and then the fall from the latter so far far from the pedestal when you're the nice guy and you're trying to be the prince the eye would have violent tempers never like physically violent but like just just explode and i think it's an important point that you just brought up too it doesn't have to be intentional but just subconsciously this is how we're taught to behave as nice people i'm not saying people are intentionally trying to be dishonest but just by the way that we're socially conditioned and when i talk to people attacking people's religion or their politics is the least effective way to help them i go at culture is our biggest blind spot as humans having played in all the continents around the world basketball and all these different cultures learning to be a bridge as a team captain and learn to work and communicate with people culture is our biggest blind spot because everyone and their mother in their respective cultures says my values are the best values and so if everyone's saying that then it's a wash and everybody is saying that yes so your culture it really is just what your culture is is your software operating system that's installed into your brain your brain is a hard drive your culture mormonism let's say is a microsoft japanese culture could be mac or linux and yet here we are trying to have conversations with people from different cultures being outraged that they're not operating and computing at the same values that we are and then we say they obviously must be an inferior operating system i am an android user iphones suck software is ridiculous we're saying the same things when we say america's number one we're god's chosen country it's our job to bring democracy to the world yet oxymoronically we say we also don't trust our government congress is corrupt congress doesn't do a good job but still we need to package this up and go sell it to the rest of the world failing to see how we're doing this oxymoronic mental gymnastics with ourselves we do this all the time and i and i think it's important a lot of my listeners are either progressive mormons or post-mormons and a huge blind spot i think for us post-mormons is that we we now are developing our new culture of of having left a religion and it's very because we haven't been reflective on some of these founding principles we can create a post-mormon culture where we think we're superior to people that were believers self-ionization is a human condition across the world self-lionization is a human condition across the board no matter what culture and self-lionization but just because we left a religious tradition that was patriarchal or oppressive or you know exceptionalistic and and based on non-non-truths let's just say that doesn't mean that the culture we move into is superior or that it's not misogynistic or or not um exceptionalistic uh as well and so we have to we have to be where we are and realize that we're still swimming in a lot of this conditioning um even if we've even if we've left a religious tradition we're bringing up the fourth principle of perseverance was a discomfort of you saying for us to ever think that we truly arrive is only putting us back where we first started yeah that the mormon system says we have the answer if everyone just follows the system everything will be great but we live life long enough now to know that if it was the one and only way everyone would have figured that out by now and we would all have confirmation bias but for a group of people to move out of the into the unknown is a very scary thing to do and so it is completely understandable for the human psychology to then say well okay what are our values okay let's make sure that we're able to confirm with each other that we're making the right decisions and so therefore our values are in fact better than other people's values so i know that this risk i took stepping into the unknown was worth it and so ex-mormons can be aggressive they can be arrogant they can be judgmental they can be patriarchal absolutely misogynistic they can be racist they can be homophobic they can be all the bad things all the best sex mormons if they're not self-reflective on the culture that they've brought into wherever they are yeah i mean quite often it's not it's not across the board i watch your comments and followers enough on mormon stories but you see enough that people you have your culture of your immediate your family culture you have your religious or community culture and then you have your geographical culture and then you have your national culture that a lot of people are then are usually able to leave the family with a religious culture but then oh if i'm not mormon anymore oh but i'm still an american and we are the greatest country in the world oh lance wait you mean you're coming after that story too don't make me that uncomfortable i don't want to have to really but that's the whole thing when i tell people you can't just do the cue change your thoughts change your life you have to rewire the entire motherboard you have to rip out the entire culture software and say okay that is mormon thinking so a good example to use and i'll just try to explain this that what you talked about ex-mormons can be aggressive proselytizing preaching right missionaries you were conditioned to be missionaries and so i see i still you still you sound like you sound like an angry mormon now that you feel it's your job to bring the facts to people and convert them right when i tell people the best way i've never tried to convert anybody but i have shut down anyone trying to challenge me for not being mormon anymore by simply saying i did everything i was supposed to do and i just wasn't happy it blows their mind yeah how do they respond to that so to anyone listening if you have family challenging you and you're trying to hit their facts with their facts their scripture that against their scripture all that battling if you really want to shut it down you move out of the linear because here's the thing john logic is not always reasonable logic is what our brain does to stay within our paradigm logic is how our brain connects dots to justify our reality our paradigm our religious beliefs to have it make sense logic does not mean it's reasonable or rational logic can be truly flawed yeah and so when you're trying to hit people with linear logic who are linear logic thinkers if you hit them then from the heart with emotions with feeling and you just say i wasn't happy they short circuit they don't know how to compute that and it shuts down the conversation and that's compassion which is the third moving into compassion let's talk about compassion really really quickly i know we're going all over the place no no it's okay i was just going to say one of my favorite quotes is you can't deconvert someone from a position with logic that they arrived at through emotion because most people arrive at their positions through emotional exactly his family ties you know life experiences yes you know conversion to a religion is an emotional and a social experience yes and so you can't use logic to deconvert someone from mormonism when their conversion was rooted ultimately in familial social and emotional stuff but before we jump into that yeah go ahead what i want to do is have you just tell us take us through how you ended up deciding to write this book and then i want to jump into the content of the book okay so let's uh so you you want to go to work bottom your quote is a really good quote people arrive to these positions through emotions but then they solidify it with logic you through confirmation bias confirmation exactly that reinforces the emotion and so to attack their confirmation bias with other logic you have to go undermine it with emotion yeah you have to hit their original emotion with your emotion exactly that's the only way you can actually have a real authentication that's why you go to you weren't happy exactly because that's that's going from the logic to you exactly how do you argue with that it wasn't making me happy right and so yeah i loved that was a great point um so i retired from basketball as i was going through a divorce as a single dad and the loss of a marriage and that sense of identity was more painful than the loss of the nba dream and we so badly look for podcasts and cheat sheets and shortcuts to bypass pain irony is is pain heartbreak is our greatest teacher and so this book though i have my seven principles of perseverance it's it's a devotion it's not a system and there's just things that i learned from myself but also great mentors and coaches that i admired the trace that they have perseverance versus stubbornness perseverance is the ability to adapt stubbornness is the inability to adapt i had lots of coaches who are very stubborn very few who are perseverant and those are the coaches i draw from that help me come with the backbone of this book but as i was writing as i was going through the process of a divorce trying to figure out what am i going to do how am i going to provide for my kid i can't just retire and become a teacher or a basketball coach because uh that there's not enough money to be i can't even buy a home who's gonna pay for my kids child care when i'm coaching kids it just didn't make sense so i was like well i hear there's this rumor you can get paid to do motivational speaking so let's give that a shot and flying by the seat of my pants having no idea what the hell i was doing i figured it out somehow some way and once what you what is your polygamy came out that really catapulted the new career and the publisher at sounds true macmillan heard the tedx talk and they approached me and we began to have some conversations about what's a what's a book and i said we can do the principles of perseverance they say well we love the principles of perseverance but you know i think this would be a good time for you to really talk about the challenges from your extreme experiences of masculinity from polygamy and professional sports because part of my saying but from the american standard there is no more alpha position than the athlete because politicians rock stars actors all show up on the front row to watch the athlete perform but also improvise rock stars rarely improvise they have a set rehearsal politicians definitely don't improvise actors have scripts the athlete is constantly improvising so that's why it's inspiring for even other alphas to go watch them and so living in those extreme experiences sounds true felt that i had earned a rite of passage to even be in a position to start this conversation this uncomfortable conversation about toxic masculinity and how are we as human and men going to evolve it's one thing for people to say we humans evolved into pack animals as though that's the ceiling evolution means there's constant progression where are we going to go from here right yeah that is the next step and that's the question and what was clear to me as i read you know as i was reading your book is that you've had to do a lot of personal work yes and even as i talked to you just this morning this stuff is you're not looking at notes you're not this is stuff you've internalized yeah and i i really do feel like as as you know transformational's brene brown has been and as world famous as she now has been you know and i'm a fan of eckhart tolle and you know oprah and and uh cheryl straight and so many kind of of the wisdom teachers dalai lama tiknot han like i'm always looking for people who i feel like have not only gained wisdom but have tried to use it to really transform their lives and have internalized the principles and not to ever set anyone up on a pedestal but i feel like you really have made a conscious effort to internalize the principles in this book and to try and transform your life as a result and to me that's more inspirational than somebody who just thank you well i'm a snob like you in that it's very hard to inspire me because anyone can regurgitate wayne dyer or eckhart tolle right but have you actually paid the toll yeah and you are someone that has well i'm trying to well the thing is and this is part of it it's part of it yeah but the existential crisis that you were brave enough to go through in such a public discriminatory light that death and rebirth of the phoenix energy that you had to go through was very inspiring and that's the peaceful warrior that emerged from that that's what's so threatening to people it's not your brilliant intellect that threatens people it's the size of your heart and the toll that was paid because leaders who haven't paid the toll who politic their way or again regurgitate wisdom or scripture because they're they're fluent in the tongue they'll always be threatened by peaceful warriors who've actually walked through the fire and that's why i've always been able to admire you and uh appreciative of the journey you've been able to take um because that is what people need to see it's one thing to say there's another thing to actually do and more importantly live and i love eckhart tolle wayne dyer and all those people but there is a truth whatever you want to call it when the new alpha male came out last year the same day that kovit came and everything was shut down energetically it was right on time commercially maybe not so much but i had someone say to me i love how you built on the shoulders of joseph campbell and i told them i've never read joseph campbell that when you go through enough heartbreak and enough pain and you get your false identity and ego and the illusion of masculinity out of the way and you're so vulnerable and exposed that you just let yourself die whether you want to call it spirit or universe or energy or whatever you then put yourself up or genius as the greeks would call it tapping into genius i'm not a genius no one's a genius but are they able to get out of their own head and tap into genius that i was able to speak similar truths from joseph campbell even though i've never read joseph campbell this does not mean that i am special it means that this isn't about me it means that once lance got out of the way once i let go of being important and special i was then able to tap in to truth universal truth not mediated to me from someone else yeah and i have to say joseph campbell's i think it's called the hero with the thousand faces um he has a series with bill moyers where they talk about the hero's journey he's the inspiration for star wars of course yeah so many other things and i think he relies a lot on carl young yeah one of the originals he built and so it's great stuff um i so i and i loved that uh quote you gave that you had to let your story die for you yeah to live right either i can die with my stories or my story can die yeah i love that so let me so transitioning now just to this book one of the hurdles i had to get over is even the use of the term alpha now i know that you said that some women chose the title not you yeah um and there's probably you know whenever a publisher chooses uh a title they're trying to it's like click bait they're trying to get people to look at it or think about it like the book the subtle art are not giving a [ __ ] right exactly brilliant click bait yeah brilliant and i hear it's a pretty good book too pretty good book so um but but you also do use the term in the book you know if you really want to be an alpha here's how to do it right and and what i what i've had to do is like wait a minute i don't want to be an alpha like when i think alpha male i think of like the head gorilla with the gray back that's like dominant over all the gorillas and like i'm thinking i don't want to be an alpha i want to be an egalitarian you know like one of many peers with everybody being as part of a council where we make decisions together but even just the the use of the term alpha implies a person who's over everybody else so help us understand how you're using the term alpha in a way that doesn't turn us off yeah so again i'll go back to what i it reiterated i'll reiterate alpha is the act or doing or the being and living a difficult way that most people are unable to live meaning that again are you able to extend compassion and have an intimate real conversation with someone who is breaking down and that makes you uncomfortable because it's bringing up your own insecurities that's a very difficult skill to learn so alpha as i'm defining it redefining new alpha man or woman is someone who was willing to step out of their comfort zones and do difficult things that they were not culturally taught to do what's the root of the word alpha what does it mean is it new alpha is just one the first letter in the alphabet alpha okay one one alpha in greek alpha is a it's the first letter so you're the you're the first and so by that definition you are blazing a trail maybe just for your family for your children for your posterity to live a new way so alpha doesn't mean have to mean you have to become uh president or ceo it means just being brave enough to carve out a new path for even just yourself yeah so tell me if it's okay to when when we hear the word alpha to think you know like christ talked about being born again yeah like uh richard rohr talks about the first half of life in the second half of life almost eckhart tolle talks about any an awakening awakening yeah an enlightenment it's true it's not that you're enlightened it's not that you're awakened it's that you've had this rebirth of consciousness where you want to be born again with a new a newness of who you are and who you want to be and to do things fundamentally differently yeah and how than the culture within which you were raised yes that would be the sixth principle of perseverance which is transformation or at the corporate level i call it being a leader of your own life and you hear me use that term in my tedx talk what is your polygamy learning to be a leader of your own life which is i decide for myself my metrics of success my metrics of happiness that once you have explored all corners of a system or been expelled from a system that you realize okay there's nothing for me here am i going to slowly die because i'm afraid of abandonment fear of abandonment is usually our greatest driver the human level 90 of humans operate from fear and abandonment is usually the root of that fear and so we conform and we neglect we abandon essential parts of ourselves so we won't be abandoned and so in transformation you are being willing to step out and be brave enough to say all right i now decide for myself my metrics of success and my metric john is one word clarity clarity of being and clarity comes by asking questions asking myself hard questions and you're a philosopher archetype that you and i both share systems hate philosophers because the philosopher is the one always asking the question the philosopher really is the moral compass of humanity saying well how is this moving humanity along to a greater purpose systems say nope stay inside this box the system and everything will be safe so your philosopher archetype was triggering people from a long time ago well before you got excommunicated but that philosopher archetype is now what is continually allowing you to step into this alchemical fire the phoenix energy of death and rebirth of being transformed asking every time and being able to let go and surrender many iterations of who you were even from the time that you were ex communicated to now i can imagine there were two or three other identities that you tried to fit into that you've had to furthermore let go as well because once you step into that transformational process it becomes a never-ending part of your life as you move toward clarity being able to let go more and more of these constricting limiting boundaries that are just comfort zones comfort zones are just limit they're just illusions that we humans glob onto to feel like we're safe when really what the athlete teaches when we step into that surrender surrendering identities of who we are and surrender is the fifth principles of perseverance when an athlete is in the zone when he's on fire when we watch jordan light at the trailblazers in 1993 averaging 40 a game in the finals then his brain was off meaning when you're aiming your shots and you're enough of an athlete to know this when you aim and you're thinking you miss your shots that when you're just in your body and you are flowing with life you're flowing with the game you're responding not reacting you're both masculine and feminine masculine is shooting the ball feminine is passing the ball right left-handed if i'm always shooting the ball i become easy to guard because i'm predictable if i'm always passing i'm predictable not just in basketball but in life so the trick is is getting heart centered in your body trusting your body and his intuition and his instinct the body is very intelligent it has just as much electromagnetic energy pulsating as the brain does yet the brain in our hubris says i am the only important part the body says that's not true i am just as if not more important and so that's what the athlete is teaching us when we're in the zone i can tell you those games when i was on fire i wasn't even analyzing sure i had mental memory recall recognizing this familiar structure set or defense knowing what is going to happen but that then allows my body to recall on muscle memory and trust and flow with it that is that when someone has stepped into a zone when you watch your favorite athlete baseball football basketball when they're in the zone they are 100 in their body their brain has shut off and when that is true you've surrendered that it's not even lance doesn't even exist anymore in that moment that's bliss that's euphoria that's enlightenment that's ecstasy whatever you want to call it because my brain is shut off and the ego is no longer saying this is who i am this is my story these are my merit badges these are my trauma this is how i identify myself this i'm the victim people need to feed into that all that goes away and everything is just quiet and you're flowing with life that is the lesson that the athlete teaches yeah ironically you have all the ceo sitting on the front rows saying oh great job kevin durant you made the instinct to play from the broken play you want to make the home run play good job the next day they'll go and hamstring their employees and say well what did the stats say as athletes stats inform us but they don't drive us again we're the in we improvise that's what inspires people that's what athletes do that you can have all the information but that's not why everyone freaked out with kovid2 because we thought we had enough stats that we thought we were in enough control that we made the world our [ __ ] but then suddenly like oh wait we actually don't have control oh my gosh i'm going to lose my mind how am i going to make sense of this i got to come up with a crazy conspiracy theory to say this is what's happening rather than just saying we're all here for a ride man mother earth is in charge and we're just flowing with life and we have a choice to either resist it and keep getting in trouble and get benched like i did many times as an athlete or i can get on and just ride the wave i love it okay so now that we've kind of learned about your background talked about what you mean by alpha and kind of painted the picture for a new vision at least begun to paint the vision for kind of a new vision of uh what it might be to be a a man or or masculinity redefined which i love just that you're starting with an integration of the male and the female that we're all like i have a i have a child who identifies as transgender and as gender non-binary i haven't really talked about this publicly because my child hasn't up until now given me permission to because recently my child gave me permission so this child identifies as as jin and non-binary they don't use he she or um he or she pronouns they use they them pronouns and they they've had me so i'm going to refer to it my oldest child adrian with what you guys will think of as plural pronouns so they them because that's the pronouns they are not comfortable identifying with male or female pronouns because they don't feel like the gender of man or the gender of woman fits for for them and and this is really really hard stuff because it is men feel threatened when the male gender is threatened and women can feel threatened when the female gender is threatened my child isn't trying to threaten either gender my child is just trying to identify in a way that they feel comfortable and they don't feel comfortable being called a a woman fully or male and and i'm you know i'm very much uh probably a typical man in many ways to where this this took me some time to really feel okay with but one of the things they tried to help me understand is that gender is a spectrum yes it's fluid super it's fluid in that it can change but it's also a spectrum in that there's nobody that's what is is it a is it a female to cry okay but wait you know men that cry right and men cry and it's healthy to cry well is it is it male to be a provider no there's plenty of women that are great providers is is it male to be good in math no there are plenty of women that are good in math you know is it is it male to be into science no there's plenty of women that are phenomenal scientists is it female to be a nurturer no there's plenty of men that are phenomenal nurturers and there's some moms who aren't great nurturers and so you're is it long hair no is it is it color of clothes no like what is gender this is something that's really uncomfortable for us yeah but it's actually really profound because it is gender can be these boxes that really constrain us from being our full selves and the truth is there the wise people that i know believe that men and women often share in the full spectrum of what it means to be male or female or other there are some traits that are just human traits that you really can't assign to a gender no and so i just wanted to say i love it that you're talking about part of the new alpha male embraces his feminine energy or his feminine qualities and that such i would imagine that if you said that in a in an nba locker room or at least maybe five or ten years ago there might have been some mocking or or some some pushback on a on a on an alpha male saying hey i'm embracing my feminine side at all right yeah but that is where i have the privilege and again i've earned the right to as an athlete to be able to have people understand through sports metaphors that again if i am hyper masculine on the basketball court or in life if i'm always puffing my chest driving around the harleys looking for confrontation trying to emasculate other people because i'm afraid someone's going to do it to me i become predictable and the universe does not suffer one-dimensional folk very well whether it's a basketball court or life you have to play it like a game you have to give yourself as many coping skills and resources as possible i'm right-handed but i actually learned to score more with my left hand as a professional to extend my professional career it made me hard to guard which way is he going to go right hand is masculine left hand is feminine or right brain that's where the artist is and so therefore that metaphor applies to life as well people didn't know which shoulder the guard me where i was going to go in the post same thing in life is lance going to do something hyper masculine right now or is he going to be very passive and gentle and let life just come to him and flow this time and so being able to speak in those metaphors helps people understand that we have to have masculine and feminine in that if we're hyper masculine hyper feminine another simple metaphor the earth is half light half dark at all times if the earth was always in sunlight it would die you have to have the night you have to have the day you have to have black and white you have to have both masculine and feminine to be balanced but that's where systems corporations patriarchy and religion throws us off you have to be one-dimensional wear the white shirt or the smile on your face that's them actually throwing you out of your power out of your balance also very binary right very binary or another absolutely you can't be two things can be two things at once but yes you can but again that's what the athlete is displaying let's talk about jordan again very masculine when he pushed off byron russell for the game-winning shot in 1998 against the utah jazz very feminine when he passed off to steve kerr and john paxton for their respective nba titles not just that in that documentary you mentioned he gets emotional he does it's several points and you realize that yeah men can cry men cannot emotional atheists are extremely emotional yeah we're very emotional people and yet because we're afraid to actually feel safe that's why we do crazy stuff when we retire drug addiction violence or whatnot because we just don't have a safe space because again a lot of women aren't comfortable with their heart-centered space that they think i'm attracted to a hyper-masculine man he has to be hyper-masculine i can't have any vulnerability from my man because i need to know that he's still going to put food on the table so the point you talked about some women are even threatened by binary by non-defining genders because it also is threatening their story of i just have to be pretty or a house mom and my life will be taken care of that's the american dream but the way your daughter's living is threatening to that system child you're entitled is very threatening to that system because so even women who supported trump you on one hand you're like why would women support this guy because he was a bastion or at least pretended to be of a protector of this old american way of gender roles that i was raised to be an alpha man she was raised to be a pretty girl we get married and the system remains intact but the way your child living and us even having these kind of conversations then is challenging people to say well i put all my eggs into this one basket you tell me i have to develop other skills now i can't be one-dimensional that's really scary yeah and here's the thing compassion let's talk about compassion third principle we can shame people for not being as quick as we have been forced to be to move into this way but shame is never once brought about true systemic change shame has forced people to be publicly contrite but then they fester in the dark and then they wait for a chance to get their revenge real compassion is being able to say to a man who's terrified that he was taught to be a coal miner and those jobs are going this isn't going to give me any other skills and we can say yeah now you know how it feels we can shame them or we can say yeah it's really scary and we got your back and we're going to help you learn other skills we're going to be here we're going to work with you and go through all this compassion is so powerful compassion is probably the hardest principle to live but here's why compassion i'm going to give a couple examples of compassion so when we have alright lance let me ask you questions what i would love to do just to provide a tiny bit of structure to this sure this last part let me just some of that let me read some of the you you've already mentioned most of these yeah but i'm gonna i'm gonna call out the book again uh the book is the new alpha male how to win the game when the rules are changing by lance allred um and uh you've already called out a lot of the principles here but what i want to do is kind of systematically go with the one okay and so we're going to repeat some of the ones you've already talked about but i want to set up and we talked about this before and i want to set up some of the let's say toxic masculine traits yeah yeah and then set up your principles as counters to right some of these toxic masculine traits that we learn not just as mormon men but as humans as human men you know okay and and so what i'll do is i'll you've already mentioned these but if you go to the table of contents here some of the main principles you advocate are accountability integrity compassion discomfort acceptance transformation and then forgiveness and gratitude yeah and so what we did is we tried to think about what the opposites of those were that would correlate with toxic masculinity and then talk about what that looks like in a less healthy form of masculinity and then how we can look at it with with some of these principles that come from your book okay so when when we start i i kind of asked you what would the opposite of accountability be and what we came up with is this sort of thing that you associate with men sometimes with athletes kind of this false vibrato yeah and i'm a man it's sports and it's physical stuff and big trucks and muscles and lifting weights swearing and then it's also like you you call this stonewalling but like packing it down i i don't have feelings i'm a man i'm strong so so talk about that and then what the counter to that would be the absence of self-reflection yeah is the opposite of accountability is what so describe that man so a toxic masculine male mormon or otherwise would be hey i'm just following the system if i just follow the system everything will be fine i don't want to ask myself tough questions and if anyone threatens this system and threatens my identity i'm not going to again allow myself to ask questions i'm going to attack anything that scares me rather than say with accountability why am i scared what stories being brought up accountability a deep level is self-honesty being able to look at yourself in the mirror and dig deep and say what are my motivating factors usually it's fear what's driving me fear fear that i will be abandoned feared if i'm not alpha enough my wife will leave me my community will leave me and so therefore i behave in over-the-top ways aggressive aggressive ways to establish my dominance because i fear that someone else would then try to dominate me which again is patriarchy and scarcity so being able to have uncomfortable conversations with yourself and check your stories check your projections that is accountability at a deep level so give us some examples of how you might do that uh or in your life when you've done it or other people talk about in the beginning again in that moment yeah how do you learn accounting in that moment when i nearly committed suicide nearly jumped out of a window and i was recovering for a couple of days it was okay i have this deep fear that i'm not worthy of love that god is angry with me that if i'm not on the top of the hill no one can love me do i know this story to actually be true no i don't it's just a narrative it's just a perspective and in that moment i said to myself i can die with my stories or my stories can die and so a a a mormon man who's probably in a crisis of faith right now you can ask what is the fear if all of these all of this history that's coming up all this research is in fact true what is the fear that's coming up the fear is then oh wait if i don't have the one true church that means my team is in the best team and if i'm not on the best team that means i'm not extra special and if i'm not extra special that means i'm not worthy of love or god's grace or heaven all those stories and if i'm not worthy of love that means i will be abandoned and i want that fear of abandonment usually is the root of why people behave in these aggressive ways or systemic ways they want to belong somewhere and they're afraid of losing that belonging and if i can extend it to people who have already lost their faith it's like well i was that i was the peter priested priesthood holder you know patriarch of my home now i don't know what i believe anymore i may not even believe in god yeah now i don't know if i believe in anything i don't know what my identity is what my morals are what my values are and i think there are a lot of men that are just saying who who am i now and i and here's the thing i know this sounds trite any man who's in this position right now that john just described i've been there many times and actually i am so excited for you stepping into the unknown that's alpha doing something that's terrifying and saying i don't even know who i am anymore once you let go of being important the world then becomes a magical place because you're no longer constricted to rules and laws of belonging that the world becomes much more rich much more fascinating curious entertaining absurd all those things the whole gamut of ranging emotions and therefore life becomes richer and that's the price we pay for a rich life stepping out into the unknown letting go of the comfort zones we were not born to be caged within our comfort zones but letting them go is very difficult to do so any man who was there i can tell you i have come to that train station so many times and i'm sure i will continue to go back to that train station until the day i die asking who am i and what legacy do i really want to leave behind that is a beautiful place to be in the place that we're taught to fear from our cultural upbringing where we're taught that there is someone else who will mediate between us and the universe or creation of spirit creator whatever you want to call it anything the the main frame of the uh you know of the computer grid or simulation theory whatever yeah i mean people ask me what i am to go off on a tangent i just say i'm a spiritual agnostic the end of the day the great my favorite greek myth is when uh odysseus was uh um stranded on the rocks and neptune had wiped out his entire uh fleet and he finally just said fine kill me and neptune the god of the sea just said silly human i wasn't trying to kill you i was simply trying to tell you you can do nothing without the gods so the greek myths are just parables for our own internal archetypal narratives and us thinking that we're in control of everything is where we create chaos in our lives and so i'm agnostic and that i will never again believe that i can think i can put god or anything inside of a box i don't know i don't think i don't think our human brains are even capable of processing how massive this universe is i think our brains would explode but i do believe it is a magical place because i choose to dance in the unknown and um so uh i went off on a tangent there i'm going to say what i what i i loved everything you just said and what what really stuck out to me was this idea that we used to think that masculinity meant to be certain yeah and to know and you're handed this identity without any self-exploration yeah and to be that identity that was handed to you yes and then you avoid uncertainty or fear by just filling that role yeah and what you're saying is and that was where you got emotional to be alpha is to say i'm i'm afraid and i don't know who i am yeah and i'm gonna go on that journey that terrifying journey of self-introspection where i begin by admitting i'm i don't know who i am i'm weak i'm fragile yeah uh and now i'll just try and figure out who i am and what i am and what i really care about yeah that's that's there's a there's a toxic masculine perspective that that's weak that you're not sure you're not certain you're not strong and confident yeah you're being humble and you're being curious and you're you're being um willing to go on this journey that that is a journey that's you don't know where it's going to end and you got emotional at that point i did you're bringing up the toxic masculinity of stubbornness that a lot of people think stubbornness is a virtue stubbornness is the inability to adapt yeah it's not the strongest or smartest to survive yeah it's those who are most willing to adapt you know what's really weak being unwilling to adapt yeah because because things that don't things that don't bend break exactly right and that makes it weak exactly and so when people want to hold oh i got my system i'm 100 sure this is the way and they will die on their sword as though that's some sort of noble thing to do it's like no it just sounds like you're too afraid to step into the unknown yeah and sometimes ex-mormons are just as certain as as orthodox mormon this is true and and sometimes we're wrong or a lot of times we're wrong and so my thing is to be flexible as well my reasoning says if i was wrong before i'll probably be wrong again absolutely yeah okay the second sort of integrity form of toxic masculinity that we identified is this this tendency to blame others to shame others to be ruled by guilt and then to project on other people now you've already addressed some of this but let's just hit it again again that's that's an accountability that's the first principle that when you are so threatened by someone else taking a journey that is different from yours that it threatens yours little rose-colored lens of life that you need other people doing exactly what you're doing to confirm to yourself that you're making the right choices because you're afraid because you're living in a cause and effect world rather than a decision a healthy decision-based world mormons mormon culture broadly speaking is a cause and effect world x plus y equals z i did this this is the result god is either blessing me or punishing me if i didn't get my blessing god's either testing me rather than as a basketball player making the nba it was hard work dedication some talent some skill also some things just have to go my way luck and timing and if i'm making the best decisions possible hopefully the odds go my way rather than saying oh the immediate outcome was bad i made a bad decision no just because you ran a red light and didn't get hit did that mean it was a good decision no uh just because you invested in the stock and it went to zero does that mean it was a bad decision no we we we tend to measure our quality of life and our value of ourselves on immediate outcomes that's that's what i mean by being cause and effect world that the mormon general culture lives in and so because everything is so cause and effect we want to see everyone around us having the same effects to confirm that we're making the right choices that our life is indeed the best way to live and so when someone else deviates from it and we are so insecure that we need everything to be black and white it then disrupts the narrative and i don't want to have to look at it and say well why would they even be unhappy how could this not be happy for them i'm just going to shame them and say they're a sinner they don't have enough faith i don't want to be introspective i don't want to go there those are some basic toxic examples of toxic masculinity in the mormon system uh and just all i want to bring in dex mormons too because sometimes ex-mormons think they're enlightened because they left a religion right ex-mormons can be just as black and white yes just as judgmental just as dogmatic and like you said earlier kind of the missionary zeal yeah you know just as they're still competing in the world from a mormon lens right just as much as that's going to trigger them i'm sorry but it is if you're seeing the world in a black and white way like that yeah you're still seeing it in the cause and effect mormon perspective yeah that everything is black and white yeah and so uh that is yeah that's that's ripe for and as any when you keep operating from absolutes like that life is going to continue to kick your ass it just is life is a trickster the universe has a sense of humor that whenever you think you're sure of something it's just going to pull the rug out from under you it's going to find ways to continue to do that and so i that's a good point that you bring up yeah okay um the next one is uh shaming judgment and aggressiveness which i think well i guess it's time to talk about integrity right yeah so now opposite of integrity so integrity we talked about this already integrity is uh disingenuity uh disintegration integrity is again me living basketball player on the court nice guy off the court integr uh not living in integrity is um changing your personality depending on who's in the room if this person has money or this person doesn't have money what this tells people if you're changing your personality depending on who's in the room it tells people that are watching and noticing that you will throw anyone under the bus for your own short-term gain that you come first and then people say i don't trust that i don't feel safe with that my boss i know my boss so when i see where to see coaches do that let me know that i'm just i'm just a stat to them i'm just a stepping stone for them for them to get their next job they don't care about me because they'll be whoever they have to be in any room to get what they want and then people say well lance what about the people who do that and play politics and get the job promotion empty calories because they have burned so many bridges on their way to get there they don't have any intimacy with anyone to share it with and so then they're going to go for that next trophy buy that new boat buy that new plane because they still feel empty inside because they have no real intimacy to share it with they think those next trophies as we were taught in our western society is what's going to fill them but it's not and so in the mormon context when we see mormon leaders or women men or women who are nice to us to our face when they go home and they're abusive to their kids at home that's not integrity at all they're not the same person in every room that they walk into and here's a promise i'll make to anyone with integrity if you operate with integrity being the same person in every room that you walk into you will get to where you need to go maybe not where you want to go but where you need to go and more importantly the right people will integrate with you integrity is the integration of all aspects of who you are owning this is me this is lance and there's the power that vulnerability you now become bulletproof because if i show the world this is my colors this is my heart these are all the things that i am i'm emotional i'm a writer i like woo-woo stuff i i i i study with the native americans i practice with them all these things that people think oh you can't let people know that's weird stuff but because it's open no one can blackmail me no one can extort me right no one can expose me because i am integrated and once i integrate with all of who i am the right people then integrate with me i love that that's the beauty of integrity i love that talk again you know there's this dynamic where those of us who have experienced the disciplinary council and this just came up with the ex-communication of natasha helfer parker i learned this when i that's a harsh story that's a tough story yeah and when i when i learned about the september 6th i remember margaret toscano describing her excommunication as being raped by care bears and these are trigger warnings that's an offensive term yeah but the idea is these men would sit there in a council of 15 men say we love you how's your family and now we're going to do one of the most psychologically and spiritually violent things that we could ever do to you and we're going to smile and say i love you as we do it what is that and how does that relate to absolutely that is that is very toxic masculinity that is that is quintessential nice guy i'm gonna smile at you and act like i actually care about you but really i am going to destroy you for my own gain i'm going to rape you for my own sense of power whether it's a physical rape or a spiritual or emotional rape those are real things and what that woman described was an emotional and spiritual raping and when someone's raped it's not really for pleasure it's for power and dominance a person wants to feel power so this poor woman was raped in front of all these men so they could feel powerful and that is that is someone when people aren't in integrity that they feel so off balance they're not heart-centered that they feel anyone operating in any sense of challenging my authority i have to go and castrate it right now or rape it to put it in its place because i have other parts of me that we all know those men probably watch porn and do other things like most men do but they're going to put on this veneer and be happy and peaceful but then once it's come time to challenge authority no they're gonna take you out because again one they don't have any accountability because they are afraid of any any self-reflection any internal questions that question why do why am i even feeling threatened by this woman why would i even feel threatened enough to want to excommunicate somebody that's a great question to ask why am i being so triggered that i feel i have to excommunicate someone that if everyone could ask that question no one would be excommunicated because it would force people to actually sit and address what fears within them are being brought up that they are uncomfortable with if they're not true integrity is yeah that again because we're living in such a superficial veneer world where we're wearing the suit and ties and everything's perfect on the surface that i am so off balance that anything throwing me off my balance i have to publicly humiliate and alienate and have the rest of the community alienate as well because we can keep our one-dimensional uh relationships and veneers intact keep it clean that's what one dimensional relationships are yeah so integrity then is to be integrated in all aspects of who you are able to have real intimate conversations people who excommunicate people are not able to have intimate conversations yeah because instead of saying uh someone who wanted to have a really intimate someone a conversation with you john who was intimate with themselves would have been able to sit down john what are these questions you're having and what fears are they bringing up oh yeah that makes me scared too or i've been there too those would be real conversation to be able to have instead is oh no you're scaring me too much we have to keep it one-dimensional not integrated no intimacy so i'm going to excommunicate you and send you away so how does a modern man and these principles apply to women as well because women can be two-faced and or you know um superficial or um what's the term where you're duplicitous duplicitous uh passive aggressive all those things right um how does someone learn to be have more integrity how does someone do this i ask myself a question every night when i go to bed uncover uncomfortable question was i the same person in every room that i walked into just that question alone that's where you begin and the rest takes care of yourself holding yourself with accountability accountability is the first principle for a reason and i know people roll their eyes at accountability and integrity yeah these boring keywords but john as you know integrity was one of the three corporate principles for enron what does it even mean people love to throw lip service at these words yeah but we're gonna now we're talking about what they actually mean and what it means to actually live them and so having the accountability to ask yourself that question am i the same person in every room that i walk into is so uncomfortable that you can barely stand to look at yourself because you don't even know who you are and you have a choice well i can go back to one-dimensional relationships but once you step on that path towards clarity there's no going back you know that all you can do is say okay well i'm going to begin to be more honest with who i am i'm going to just be much more transparent as uncomfortable as it is and if people ex tried to exploit me because they see my true colors they weren't even my people to begin with and so as you integrate all of who you are the right people will integrate with you love it okay um this is so good so the next principle you have is compassion and and again as as a mormon uh and as a western male or just as a as kind of an old mindset thinker it's about certainty and it's about the system and it's about playing your role and compassion i i've made the argument and i made this in a podcast recently empathy and compassion are two of the most dangerous things to an orthodox religion absolutely because as soon as you're sympathetic for lgbt people as soon as you realize they didn't choose it as soon as you're sympathetic to women and how they get mistreated in a patriarchy as soon as you're sympathetic to people of color or to people who have doubts or to people who are thinkers as soon as you're sympathetic to marginalized people marginalized individuals the the hard things that people go through well then you turn to the organization that's causing that harm and you say this is unacceptable so this is one of the most radical and dangerous principles it is to a patriarchy that exists so what is the opposite of of compassion that we learn in uh with toxic masculinity in a patriarchy so that we can then i love it away from it use compassion to sum up your point martin luther king gandhi and i don't believe jesus was a deity but he was the greatest buddhist of his time yeah sadducees and pharisees he was doing the same thing that you just described by giving people compassion right compassion destroys systems right which you so eloquently just set it better um it destroys structures right yeah toxic masculinity towards compassion would be like oh black lives matter all lives matter right i'm refusing when they say that i am refusing to allow myself to live in your shoes for just a moment i'm going to shut down any pain or cry for help and demean it by shaming you for trying to say black people are more important than anybody else which is what they're not saying but i'm going to spin the narrative to shame you to stay in your place compassion one of the hardest ones to live let's talk about a couple instances of compassion oh and just and just to be clear aggressiveness right just aggressiveness yeah when you think about men at their worst it's when they're like let me fight with you let me have a flamewar with you on the internet let me call you names let me call you out let me take you down it's it's that aggressive it's aggressive or in the bar it's let me fight you let me punch you in the face it's the opposite compassion is me standing in a in an arena on the road as a visiting team and having people who don't really know me project onto me their fear their hate their anger and i can choose to take it personally or i can see life is hard and people come to these sporting events to just try to relieve some pressure does that mean the way they're behaving is okay no but it does allow me to relieve the pressure and say i'm not going to take this personally and fight back with bravado instead i can just say life is hard it's probably harder for this person i can tell because they have no teeth and they're screaming at me and they're already drunk in the first quarter i can imagine they probably don't have much going for them when they go home i don't say that condescendingly it allows me to say huh okay i can probably handle them screaming at me even my hearing aids are out anyway i can't really hear what they're saying but i can feel what they're saying and so there have been many times i have failed the compassion compassion is the hardest one to live i've been through a divorce i wasn't always compassionate i interacted with your ex ex-partners ex-spouses yeah it's hard to be civil it was hard to be um and so compassion is the hardest one to live because not only culturally but especially you know mormon intermountain west pioneer heritage someone punches you you gotta punch back or you gotta punch first before they even have a chance to punch you that kind of aggressive scarcity us versus the frontier mentality that our geographical locations have so much bearing on our religious and cultural identities and that heritage that we have and so stepping out of that one thing for example black lives matter i'm not afraid to get political because i don't really think it's political it's a compassionate humanity issue having lived outside the united states been pulled over one time in venezuela the cop pulled me over took me out of the car took all my money made me feel really gross violated and exposed and in that moment i said well she's at least it didn't happen in my own country and my mind was blown because what i can't imagine having that happen to me was hard enough but am i imagining it happening to me in my own country in your neighborhood in my own neighborhood where i'm a citizen and i have rights supposed rights and you're talking about people of color who are exactly basically driving while black like that driving while black pulled over by a police officer for driving and so the toxic masculinity say oh yeah i've had to happen to me before but i got over it compassion would be say wow that really sucked but at least it didn't happen to me in my own country in my own neighborhood and so my heart breaks for you and i'm here with you and i support you i lose nothing contrary to whatever subconscious fear patriarchy says i lose nothing by giving compassion to another human being a beautiful example that will always stick with me when i was playing the minor leagues toiling away for twelve hundred dollars a month trying to make it to the nba there was an interview steve nash gave one time steve nash who was at the time mvp he says yeah i've worked hard and everything but a lot of things in life just had to go my way and in that moment i cried because he had the humility to give compassion out by saying yeah i've worked hard but the break went my way and so by me saying as a white american male there's been a lot of things that have gone my way i lose nothing it's not like they're going to come and take money out of my bank account oh lance you admitted that so we have to deduct you 50 percent those things don't happen by me giving compassion to other people and saying and acknowledging this it's giving them some intimacy and being able to meet them and say i'm doing my best to be here and hold space for you let me know how i can help you compassion is what brings about systemic change gandhi martin luther king mandela they did not demand retribution retribution is a symptom of patriarchy so even trigger warning even when you have ultra feminists demanding their pound of flesh saying now it's our turn man has to know what it feels like to be disempowered and emasculated that is a symptom of patriarchy that pendulum swinging back and forth from scarcity is patriarchy a beautiful moment happened was a friend of mine a gal who's had a lot of misogynistic things happen to her as a professional woman and i was telling her a story one day about a girl i had been dating i was really connected with her but then some really rich guy in manhattan found her on instagram and uh flew out her and her dog for a dog to have surgery and she never came back so what that really brought up for me and we have to understand this this is where compassion is required of both sides compassion cannot just be a one-way street but for my friend the girl who's had a lot of crazy stuff happen to her ridiculous stuff for her in that moment she could have said oh well she has a right to do it she's a girl time for women to be empowered instead she said that's really shitty i'm sorry you had that happen lance she met me with compassion so here's the thing about compassion it is those who have been most wronged that have the duty frankly to stop just short of an eye for an eye and demand full retribution and instead bring grayson and forgiveness and that's where change comes rather than full retribution full retribution just keeps going back and forth back and forth i love that when i when i when you say that compassion doesn't cost you anything i want to ask you a question about that because i think whether this is conscious or subconscious if you're a white cisgender heterosexual you know middle to upper middle class male right educated yeah you're swimming in just like you're you're the most powerful you're in the not just the one percent you're in the point zero zero one percent of power in the world right and anytime you're any time uh a j a racial redistribution of power is discussed a gender redistribution of power uh a sexuality redistribution of power a socioeconomic redistribution of power it it the feeling the fear whether again whether it's conscious or unconscious is you stand to lose power yeah by because once you show empathy for people of color transgender people lgbt lgb people women minorities poor whoever it is once you show just like with the church once you show empathy and compassion for them just like the church loses its power you as the the alpha male right you you stand to lose your power which means maybe you won't make as much money maybe you won't have as much control maybe you won't be uh have as many freedoms or as much privilege as you once had i think that's the fear or the perspective and that's a story that's a story but i think that's you nailed it so what would you say is maybe maybe maybe maybe just stories that we're living in fear if i give them compassion now they're going to want a foot later and then a yard and they're going to come from my house and then they're going to come for my guns and everything's going to be taken from me which is just scarcity yeah that's patriarchy yeah that you think there's not enough to go around for everybody yeah a powerful thing for the women listening right now yes for white male men the system was rigged our way and we have to be honest if we did not excel in the system that then is a scary mirror to look at because if we know it was designed to work our way but it isn't it really isn't as we see now a lot of people who are drawn to trump and this populism that they think these old jobs are going to come back because they're afraid the system is leaving and it is because all systems fade away and change and change that is very terrifying that way i was taught to grow up in the system that i'm now a generation too late for and i am terrified and i still have enough experiences and i'm asking myself why was i drawn in just the last four or five years to these kind of women that i thought were very emotionally safe women that would still then leave me for someone richer so that is where women still have to have compassion for men that we have this huge fear and it is confirmed because we see enough young women dating older man with money that if i do not have enough money i am not alpha enough and so while the movies that they drag us to tell us they want intimacy and vulnerability when push comes to shove sometimes sometimes women want security yeah push come to shove is 50 50 almost a woman wants security or does she want vulnerability intimacy with a partner as they grow together sometimes someone will want to trade up socioeconomically and if it doesn't come with socioeconomic and i i'm not saying so emotional intimacy yeah so i'm saying that this still happens enough to reinforce old alpha behavior right that these men still feel they have to be this false bravado i'm not saying yes okay they're being but i'm saying women have to be compassionate enough to admit that that social trade-up is still happening enough just as it's happening that men are marrying younger women leaving their wives is dual yeah men want the pretty men often want the pretty young thing yes the trophy absolutely because that's also very old alpha old alpha and oh if your wife gets into her 40s and there's some gray hair and there's some wrinkles and the body's shifted because of children yeah just like sometimes women want to trade up for a man with more power and money and status a man might want to trade quote up or down yeah for the younger prettier exactly i'm not saying these are okay what i am saying is they both happen enough that both parts of a relationship need to be able to have real talks about that and be intimate and talk about it and so therefore that allows women to be compassionate to men that fear that we have if i lose my job my wife is going to leave me the women have the fear yeah if my body changes and i get old my husband's going to leave me those are scary conversations to have but we have to recognize that's a fear in both and be able to have compassion and have those real kind of intimate conversations and those are not just one-night conversations and suddenly you're over it that kind of deprogramming takes a long time yeah that's a long journey of two three years of work of daily challenging those kind of questions and internal narratives totally okay so that's kind of a preview of uh of compassion yeah um again we're we're talking about the main chapters from the book the new alpha male and i have to say this has great illustrations of stories from your life from people that you know from coaches from players from just living life uh you're gonna and there's an audio version of the book so i i primarily consume this in an audio version but i think to get the full effect i really do think you need to buy it you need to mark it up uh and and it's worth it um okay so the next one the next chapter chapter six for you is discomfort yes and i think we we wrote as a counter to that kind of the illusion of control or certainty because we want to avoid discomfort um and so we want this illusion of control and certainty yeah which is system you know that i think that is religion's main role and i think where mormonism most shines yes is to say hey don't fear death don't fear being poor don't fear being alone don't fear the afterlife because we've got all the answers just just obey fill in this role become the male or the female get married go on your mission have kids get your job serve in the church until you die get on that mormon train and you won't have to worry about what happens when i die you won't have to worry about being alone or sad not having friends not having community all of that it's almost like public school all of that is just packaged for you and given to you and you'll never have to have suffering or pain or fear it's almost like the garden of eden or the truman show as you mentioned in your book it's like we'll give you this safety i mean you i mean the the movies are endless tangled um the matrix moana um small foot uh the village pleasantville the invention of lange they're all about this system that's set up to minimize your pain and discomfort right to give you the illusion of safety and security yes go go lance oh this is going to be a fun one i love this one the no other religion has more of a happy ending than mormonism families can be together forever and also we get to be gods and create our own worlds and have millions of children themselves that's not to like what's not to like about that yeah that story is so satisfying that who if they didn't have she would want to leave that behind when i hear a mormon so when you hear the stories i can be with my family together forever here's the logic flaw families fight families argue but then suddenly when we get to heaven everything's going to be peaceful who then has the personality change so most humans mormons especially when we talk about heaven we just assume that we get to take our culture with us that we think our culture is a universal language it's not our culture is a geographical influenced earthly confluence of ancestors again geography religion trauma war nature all those things but a lot of people they want to be able to take our culture because it's what's familiar to us into the next life that's not likely going to happen just logic alone because suddenly again who has a personality change that everyone suddenly gets along the comfort illusion is so interwoven with the american dream with ezra taft benson and his work with secretary interior mormonism is so ancestrally woven agriculture say what he was secretary of agriculture agriculture thank you yes is mormonism so interwoven with the american myth that we need to believe the american dream is true that i as an individual control my fate and that i can have all my dreams come true if i just follow the system yeah that's oxymoronic people want their dream to come true but they also want to stay inside their comfort zones you can't have both again as we talked about the train station when people are in that place of questioning when you step outside of your comfort zone that's where the magic of life happens growth right growth pain right growth comes from pain and so people keep trying to bypass pain and i said earlier pain or heartbreak is our greatest teacher and people don't want it they want to grow but they want us to still fit inside their narrative where everything looks good they want to grow within their box and have all this tiny world this snow globe and all these happy ending things because part of people are afraid if their dreams really do come true they won't fit inside their box anymore some part of humans know that at some primal level we know we really want to have the success that we dream of we're going to have to outgrow this box and so most people will choose comfort and security or as i said in tedx most people would choose a familiar hell over an unfamiliar heaven because it's what they know is what they're familiar with and so again you have all these people playing the victim because i want to stay inside my box i still want to believe in this religion even though i'm having a lot of pain and struggle right now and i'm trying to get i can't get ahead financially but i still want to believe that i'm special that we're god's chosen people because at least i got that going for me and also i'm an american and we're the best country in the world so as long as those outer narratives are in place the internal really myopic lens of i'm not happy i'm not fulfilled my husband and i aren't talking to each other anymore nothing's fun i can endure that at least i guess because again my heaven is going to be really really good but they keep living this dichotomy and you see it on social media you see the victim archetype language all over i'm not happy why does this keep happening to me that victim archetype is everywhere with the bully the bullying the victim do this continual dance get over a snowflake oh the the election was rigged now i'm the snowflake right they just do this continual dance with bullying victim and that happens on both sides democrats absolutely these two absolutely democrats this is continual dance yeah the bully to the partisanship the problem isn't democrats or republicans it's it's black and white world views yes assuming you know what's true yeah aggressiveness and then demeaning the other side that's the victim and also the child archetype right the child archetypes see things in black and white that's how a child can only make sense of a world and yet we as adults still take that child into the world because the world as we get older and older we learn that we don't know anything at all the more we learn the more we learn how little we know and so therefore the child comes up and wants things to stay safe in certainty and sees things in these black and white narratives and then they want to see things in black and white narratives but then their dreams aren't coming true they aren't having these lies that they've been chasing things aren't coming true but they're like oh well okay it can't be that maybe i have to outgrow my entire cultural internal mainframe of how i process the world my world my brain is just a processing computer of how i process this world i don't want to reframe that i'm just going to be a victim and throw out a conspiracy theory and say the world's rigged against me that i'm important enough that the government would go out of his way to single me out and try to control my life i was raged with conspiracy theorists it was integrated at the pulpit with religious doctrine that the world is so out to get us that we have to live on the fringes as outlaws and once we do enough outlaw things and break enough rules the government will in fact come and raid our compound confirming our self-fulfilling prophecies that the government is against us and this big giant conspiracy around them i saw the whole thing but of course as a kid i'm saying okay so we're god's chosen people but he also doesn't have our back he's not going to protect us from the world that doesn't make any sense but that's what we do we play these mental gymnastics in these comfort zones in these boxes in these paradigms to make it fit because stepping into the unknown letting go of my identity taking risk being willing to fail failure just means you're stepping outside your comfort zone that's good mediocre is staying inside your comfort zone and people think they're entitled to big things when they stay inside their comfort zone you can't have both and so at the mormon level you have a lot of people uh who are still trying to stay inside this paradigm this narrative and yet with capitalism the disparity continues to grow and grow and grow and instead of them saying oh maybe this system isn't really working anymore it's either conspiracy theory or i'm not worthy enough god's testing me or punishing me and i don't deserve to be happy and i don't deserve to have my dreams come true i love my father i saw him go through all those because letting go of the entire mormon thing was so painful an entire comfort zone of who is vance vance is the theologian what you mean is all a lie maybe then what were all those years for now who the hell am i that's a very scary place to go but from my parents challenging and blowing the whistle on child abuse and money laundering i was able to see them cut their losses and step into the unknown and there's great dignity and starting over because you're never starting over from scratch you're starting over with experience so it's not a loss can i also extend this to the ex-mormon experience for a second absolutely because i would love to think about how the archetypes sometimes apply to ex-mormons as well and how ex-mormons get stuck raging against the church in ways that don't always lead to their growth like some i've people have kind of joked at me uh and some people even accused this thrive thing as being an mlm or some type of i don't sell these hats i don't make any money off of it it's not an mlm thrive is simply an idea that you can heal and grow after mormonism right that's the idea and that's all i want thrive to represent is that you don't have to get stuck in mormonism in a religious system or in anti-mormon and ex-mormonism you can heal and grow and move beyond it however it is easy to get stuck as an ex-mormon in some of these archetypal paradigms so for example the child or the victim right well the church hurt me right which it did the church abused me which it did or what's the black and white archetype uh well the black and white child would be the child it's also the child so it's like okay now i'm in a black and white world where the church is all evil right and i'm all i know it all and i'm good yeah i i'm just curious if if some of these archetypes that you talk about can apply to ex-mormons absolutely well you just went through a couple of them and so what are some of the archetypes so the the four survivor archetypes from carl young are the child the victim the saboteur and the prostitute okay let's go through the languaging child says i need someone to fulfill my needs i need someone to protect me i need the world to make sense in a black and white way victim says why does this always happen to me things always bad people always leave and also i need full retribution i need my pound of flesh there you go prostitute says and what was that last archetype that was a victim okay yeah and how many ex-mormons want the church to have the pound of you want to extract that pound of flesh from the church and there needs to be accountability and so this is difficult and i part of what this podcast is about is shining a spotlight on the church showing where it hurts people awakening people to the lack of informed consent and so i always am constantly battling how much of that is healthy yeah versus how much of it is it is revenge and trying to extract a pound of flesh sometimes i don't even know myself right you know the world needs more teachers less victims and so stories are important but again who is telling the story yeah the teacher or the victim yeah the victim takes from people the teacher gives wisdom to people too many people operating the victim this happened to me i need this i'm going to take your empathy your pity your sympathy to make me feel validated enough that i'll stay here social media really feeds into that one so that victim archetype and bully archetype again do this dance because they're constantly rewarded on social media and so the challenge is the great oxymoron or the irony a better word when you lead the church and you keep focusing on it and you keep attacking it you're still giving it power as painful as that is to hear i have had to leave many systems behind religious basketball programs and many times i wanted a pound of flesh i get it i get it and we'll get into the seventh principle in a bit of gratitude and forgiveness and talk about the necessity of these experiences and why we have them and what we can choose to do with them and learn from them but because the mormon church as a culture as a system teaches us to be children even children childlike all the time as adults be children that we need someone to hold our hand and get us to heaven we're taught to be childlike as adults john so that when we leave we break away it would make sense that the child archetype would be thrashing and screaming and wailing saying this isn't fair who's going to hold my hand now someone needs to save me and protect me and the victim comes and says yes i was wronged. i was exploited i need my power in the flesh those are the survivor archetypes that is ego consciousness when i say survivor ego that is you in reaction when you're reacting to the world that means that you are in survivor archetype when you're responding to the world that means you have brought in other archetypes whether it's the hero uh the philosopher the lover the poet the lover says i love what i do and i love what i create and i do not care what the world thinks the sovereign says i for myself create my own fate we all have these archetypes that's what the greek myths are they're metaphors for the archetypes you know this with all your philosophy studies the archetypes within ourselves that are the resources that we have to learn to bring up and let them take the will the teacher the judge the king there's so many archetypes that we could go through but most of us to belong in systems have to be the child because the child doesn't ask questions the child just does what it's told and systems need people to do what they're told to survive amen amen okay so uh so we need to get comfortable with discomfort we need to learn how to sit in our pain and our discomfort our sadness our fear yes all of this strife because if we jump to certainty or a black and white world view we we we miss the point if it's all about being republican or democrat we miss the point if it's all about white people or black you know white power or black people power we miss the point yes if it's all about being a man or a woman masculine or feminine we miss the point if it's all about being straight or gay you know we miss the point we have to learn to navigate a multi-colored nuanced world that includes all the spectrum of emotions not just happiness and confidence and strength and courage but also fear and sadness and anger even anger yes is a healthy valuable emotion that mormonism beats out of you and teaches you his best anger is about the devil right yes yes so i like the point you bring it up emotions before labels meaning allow yourself to step into the unknown which is the human experience and the gamut of emotions that we humans what makes us human is not our ability to think contrary to what the brain says what makes us human is our ability to feel and so allowing yourself to feel these gamut emotions is stepping into the unknown because again if you were raised in the system these you were not given the coping skills or the space or the permission to even sit with these emotions and so they would make you uncomfortable but that is where growth is and i will fully admit that being born with rh legally deaf having to wear the hearing aids being made to wear my hearing aids being made to be in speech therapy being forced out of my comfort zone every day gave me a early start on a threshold for discomfort but like anyone developing a muscle discomfort is a muscle you develop that threshold you keep pushing it you keep growing it so that's a challenge i give to everyone every day do something that makes you uncomfortable at least once a day keep building that muscle keep growing keep challenging yourself especially stepping out of black and white narratives so yeah i i've had two of my children uh and many many of my extended family experience obsessive compulsive disorder or you know high anxiety or phobias yeah and the treatment the gold standard treatment for for an anxiety disorder or for obsessive compulsive disorder is discomfort yeah you literally and it's it's a type of treatment that works but but it has a high dropout rate yeah because the treatment is to just intentionally expose yourself to discomfort and you get stronger but if you but the weird thing is is the more you try and avoid discomfort the weaker you become the smaller your life becomes the more you're putting up walls the more you're closing your windows drawing the shades and your life gets smaller and smaller the more you're willing to face discomfort to embrace it to open up to it the the stronger you are ironically and the more opportunities that arise for you externally physically and internally going inward again uh you can be uh you can be a daredevil thrill seeker mountain climber someone goes off into the jungle for two weeks just a rush seeker right that's putting yourself outside your comfort zone but a lot of those people too would rather jump off a cliff than actually sit down and ask himself tough internal questions about trauma so there's many ways to grow so it's not always just a physical but usually the internal growth growing internally is far more terrifying than any external challenge of discomfort yeah i love it okay the next principle in your book chapter seven is one that is it's very buddhist uh i learned it first with eckhart tolle and the power of now and the new earth but then secular buddhism and then the form of psychotherapy that i was trained in called acceptance and commitment therapy is all around the power of acceptance resistance it's sort of like attachment and resistance is pain and suffering according to yes buddhism acceptance of what is is liberation it is so so that that's my little primer tell us about what is the op for for toxic masculinity for sort of like alpha old alpha male what is the opposite of acceptance is stubbornness is refusing to adapt is shaming the younger generations kids these days right all that stuff people doing new things that make you feel threatened uh toxic masculinity to acceptance would also be like oh well it wouldn't be fair if uh we forgave student debts now because i had to pay my own way the logic of that is then the next one would be well i was abused as a child so my kidneys to be abused too that is ridiculous logic but that is the logic within some people in toxic masculinity that because they endured it people after them have to endure it too because again the child and the victim say i had to happen to me everyone else should have it happen to me too so toxic masculinity really is these survivor archetypes just thrashing around going into acceptance uh we talked about stepping into the zone as an athlete when you are in the flow and i am shooting any shot two feet 30 feet out and it's just hitting the barrel of the rim like the rim is five feet wide and i can't miss it is because i am in flow when i get pissed at a ref and i argue with him or i get mad with my coach i am resisting what is and i have taken myself out of the game i actually most of my teachings even though they come from the same place as native americans archaeologically speaking came from the bering strait from asia so the root is still there a lot of my teaching and growth and mentors come from the lakota salish and a few other tribes that i've nez pierce that i've been privileged to study and be with and spend time with and serve with helping me as i recovered from my suicidal depression uh in many ways language is just different but uh learning to accept and get out of your own way that again when i am in the zone and i start thinking i start aiming my shots i'm going to miss because i'm trying to control it but when you accept what is accepting is not quitting accepting is actually as a basketball player as being a good teammate because if i'm not accepting here's what i'm doing i'm saying oh i missed my last five shots i got to make this next one or else coach is going to take me out but if i am able to say i missed my last five shots because that's what was supposed to happen why was that supposed to happen because that's what happened that story is no longer chasing me i'm no longer in fear saying i gotta make this next shot which is being in my head living in fear but when i accept and say that's what happened i let it go i'm then able to be in the moment able to make the best informed decision with all the information around me again being decision focused not outcome focused decision focused quality decisions is what makes a pro not necessarily outcome so in acceptance i move into disquality decisions knowing i'm making the best decision i can and therefore that allows me to be present for my teammates acceptance moves us into surrender that's the second part of this principle acceptance is releasing control while still hoping for the best outcome for yourself surrender is a next step my favorite example of surrender is to hayoka warrior from the lakota the hayoke warrior is the warrior or the sacred clown who would ride backwards on his horse into battle and the american soldiers are like who is this clown what's this guy doing what a what a joker but to the lakota he was very sacred because he was writing backwards saying creation and i call whatever higher power it is creation because that allows me to be in this continual growing moving grid whatever it is john that the hioka warrior is saying okay creator what will be will be and i surrender and when you have surrendered you have let go of your entire identity of your story of who you thought you had to be or through who you thought you were supposed to be to belong to fit in i have had [Music] many deaths of many dreams of the person i thought i had to be i've had to surrender many iterations of who lance already was that i can look back at these stages of who i am barely recognizing that person anymore able to take those lessons from it and so when we move into surrender that is the ultimate form in my opinion of bravery being able to truly step into the void and say i no longer have attachment to the story or this happily ever after because really the story that i'm trying to hold on to is only causing me pain and again i can either die with my story or my story can die and i surrender my everything not just a story but i surrender my identity and so in mormonism or in toxic masculinity it would be there are three levels of human human consciousness individual tribal and global and we're now being asked to move into a global consciousness and that requires the sacrifice of the individual in the tribal and that scares a lot of american and mormon men who were taught to invest into mine me my trophies my possessions this means i'm alpha who who has the most toys wins wait you mean we're moving to a global consciousness and these metrics aren't even applying anymore oh no it's because they're actually trying to come and steal my stuff it's bro people don't even want your stuff so they're going to throw a fit go out with their guns acting like everyone's trying to take something from them because they're trying to hold on to go back to 1980s reaganomics reagan world but never once in the history of the world did the ref ever say to me oh lance you're mad with that call did i hurt your feelings let's walk that back or in the third quarter when they came out and started calling the game differently which they often do did they say oh you're right lance let's go back we'll call like we were in the first quarter never once has nature or evolution said to men oh i'm sorry are we making you uncomfortable let's walk this back it's not how nature works never once so we can either resist it and go extinct which we are very well at risk of doing because we're refusing to adapt or we can surrender our stories and our identities individually and tribally and move into a global consciousness and we're already halfway there because you got it's funny you have a lot of people blaming immigrants for taking jobs but then they'll turn around and buy chinese imported goods or foreign manufactured cars because they're fancy and that's the dream right but those are just tokens of exported jobs but the child says i get to have it both ways you can't have it both ways and so surrender the global consciousness as we as humans we're at this precipice right now are we going to surrender childlike things and let go of these comfort zones or are we going to go to extinct extinction and so that's the challenge being able to let go of things and step into that unknown and surrender our identities and as i i know and i feel in you again you've done it several times yourself and you know it's a heavy it's a heavy toll to pay but once you walk through it you wouldn't ever go back you never would yeah okay that leads us to transformation that kind of easy segue to transformation as you move into that energy of surrender letting go of your identity once you realize just how insignificant you are you then oxymoronically see just how significant you are to help the global consciousness grow and evolve once you let go of the individual story you can then contribute to the greater whole and letting go of the individual narrative and stories that is transformation itself and i've been through again many many times of refiners fire the phoenix energy letting go of many iterations of who i once thought i was and you move into self-actualization when you are now exposed and you're standing outside of a system and you feel vulnerable and exposed you can either say i'm terrified which you have a right to say or you can say wow look at this blank canvas that i have carte blanche to do anything with because this is my life to do and play and create rather than giving it away to some system to do with both are equally justified to feel and you can fill them both at the same time again as humans we can feel conflicting emotions at the same time contrary to what systems tell us i can feel an awe and terrified at the same time and moving into that that transformation through there now again my my one metric of success is clarity clarity of being able to say i decide for myself the truths that i wish to operate from that i create my fate or fate of better fate is what happens to me destiny is what i do with that that is the transformation that once you go through that not everyone goes with you you know this you've lost a lot of relationships even post-sex communication you've lost a lot of relationships as you continue to go through these fires continue to evolve as you went through your grieving cycle the grieving cycle is the most powerful rite of passage we have as human beings so much power comes from there and it is a heavy cost it hurts it's painful but once you come out of it your clarity is so refined that you wouldn't trade it for anything so in that transformation if people are brave enough to step into that fire of grief and let the child and the victim and the stories die and that's where we move into forgiveness and gratitude which are the final principles of perseverance the antithesis of transformation again as people no matter what even if against their best interests at the mormon level even if life just isn't working for them or if they have a gay child and they're just refusing refusing to let go of the story of the identity because it's just too scary and they know it will be painful because they'll have to look and redefine everything is not just simply again reading one positive self-help book and you're cured it's a new way of living that's what i tell people it's not this this isn't a shortcut i'm not giving you any shortcuts right now this just becomes a new way of living that once you step into the grief and the transformational fire of the phoenix energy of death and rebirth it just then becomes this perpetual experience that you keep outgrowing outgrowing and outgrowing but that's what we're made to do to continually grow that's what the universe itself does can span expand contrast that's what's always doing and so people refusing to step into that truth of expansion that is the antithesis of transformation and so what is why forgiveness and gratitude why i mean there are all sorts of things you can end with why do you end with forgiveness forgiveness and why gratitude what is it about each wise forgiveness you can't have forgiveness without gratitude real forgiveness okay what i the toxic masculinity the opposite of forgiveness would be holding grudges holding grudges punishment uh casting stuff that eye for an eye pound of flesh again child archetype um that is something was wrong with me or or even the martyr that says i'm not going to get my pound of flesh but i know i'll get my dues in heaven and they can go to hell even that is mormon toxicity of how we operate rather than recognizing everyone is on their own unique discovery that everyone himself is just an extension of the universe like it or not i mean if all this is i mean john really at the end of the day the fact that you and i are even here having a conversation is absurd whether you believe in creation theory or simulation theory or big bang theory is all absurd completely absurd and so it's like all right well this universe is just doing its thing and i'm a part of it but western theology told me i was separate from it but really i'm a part of it because everything is what it is and just it is so i'm with it and i just have to say i loved the part of your book where you talked about scale yeah scale that that was a mind-blowing beautiful part of your book i love scale i love con i love the concept of scale so what john is talking about what i alluded to in the book briefly was if you think about the solar system it looks a lot like an atom and so what if our solar system is just an atom inside the molecule someone else's hand on a different dimension in a different scale and a different frequency these are not bad things to think about these are just things that make you wonder that allow you to see just how insignificant you are and when you see how insignificant you are you are liberated see some people think well that's terrifying i what religion helped me do is feel like i'm a child of god i'm the most important thing in the world right and and and that some people found a lot of comfort in that that's what you're saying is that you're saying that's the child that's the truth that's the illusion of strength or power or significance or safety so how safety so how are we supposed to drive strength and comfort from feeling insignificant feeling insignificant and strength means that i now have a blank canvas that i am no longer beholden to someone else's metrics someone else's judgment agenda someone else's agenda someone else's rules the i am now liberated to go carve my life out in this universal construct however i choose yeah as scary as i may be most people think they want freedom but they really don't because that freedom then means wait if i have true freedom where do i belong who am i and what can i actually do with this when really they say well i just want freedom to live within my value system and no one else can threaten my value system so moving into forgiveness and gratitude you have a lot of the cliche expressions oh forgive them not for them but for you so you can move on you're still holding on to the story that you were wronged real forgiveness is being able to learn the lesson and appreciate who you became through that experience and when you are developing true intimacy with yourself through integrity accountability compassion discomfort acceptance you then fall in love with yourself not in a hubris way but in awe and ah of all the things you've seen and all the things you've done and you have so much gratitude for the clarity you've stepped into and you recognize that you would not have that without those painful experiences so you're able to have gratitude for that painful experience for example gratitude to the sunday school teacher who told me that god made me deaf as former punishment for helping me learn at a young age what unconditional love is not gratitude to my father's family who disowned us and sued us when we book away from polygamy again for showing us where unconditional love is not and showing us what real love and friendships and bonds mean gratitude to coach majerus for showing me the price of integrity and what it cost to live in integrity and the path i had to take when you left the u of u yeah as a matter of principle yeah you learned how to do what your dad did basically yeah i rep and if i did not speak out and if i did not say and speak out of what happened at the university of utah then everything my father had done would have been in vain and it allowed me to recognize the price my parents paid when they too had to speak out and walk in integrity and how they were abandoned and alienated and shamed enlisters have probably haven't heard that story about rick majerus and what you do but give them the 10 second version 10 seconds it just it got pretty it got pretty crazy and abusive uh at the u yeah disgrace to cripples uh things that he would call me fingerspell stuff and just belittling that it was it was pretty bad that i had to leave and um so you left the those stories came out and eventually i confirmed them and then he resigned a week later and here's the thing about the rick majeris thing no one wanted to believe in him more than me because from the culture i grew up and in polygamy my grandfather was a prophet he was going to get me to heaven oh that's not true oh but rick majerus will help me get to the nba that'll get me to heaven no one wanted to believe in victory jairus more than me and i still loved that man and if i saw him by the way he's i'm telling the listeners he's passed away yeah he's passed away but if i saw him today i would actually walk up to him and tell him thank you um our greatest heartbreaks are our greatest teachers and there are still many youth fans that send me hate mail and i can sit them looking in the eye if what i said was untrue why wasn't i or the tribune sued for slander they don't want to hear it and i have compassion for that because a lot of these people have hard lives and but they were able to get the season tickets breaking their backs take their kids up to the huntsman center where they and their kids watched the utes do the 1998 run to the finals it was a magical memory i was there i watched it too and both truths can exist that rick majerus did love his players but he also was very abusive and that magical run was magical conflicting truths can't exist at the same time just like conflicting emotions can kiss consists at the same time so after majera's gratitude to all the all the fans that projected on me and hated me for showing me the ills of the world which is fear last one i'll use is gratitude to the mother of my son she's the only person i could have loved that madly to be that exposed to see all the many more blind spots that i had that my worth as a man was attached to my marriage and my relationship to the system of patriarchy as painful as those experiences are they're my greatest teachers so there's tremendous gratitude for them and that's why i'm able to forgive them as well so that is the final transformation of an alpha being able to look at your wounds your trauma your pain and see the beautiful lessons and how they molded you into the person you are today how they force you to learn how resourceful you truly are and what archetypes you have within you that are here to paint a beautiful world in your own authentic way so beautiful and as i'm you know my wife margie and i along with natasha helfer a couple years ago wanted you know we we couldn't see all the coaching clients that wanted to see us we were holding workshops and retreats all over the world and we we couldn't help enough people and so we just said why don't we just spend 100 hours and put on a podcast every good thing we've ever learned about helping people through a faith crisis you know just give it away because we could never help everyone who needed our help anyway and so we created a podcast where we did that and you know for a long time i thought what should i call this what should i call this and what i ended up calling and most people don't even know this podcast exists so listeners i don't want to take away from that beautiful thing you just said but i'm tying it back i promise most of you listeners don't know there's a podcast at mormonfaithcrisis.com and it's it's 70 plus hours of my best margie's best and natasha helfer's best coaching around uh you know coming out as uh coming out as a non-believing mormon coming out to family and friends coming out to your children what is spirituality like what is sexuality like after you've left the church how do you um you know grieve it how do you go through the steps of grieving how do you redefine spirituality how do you make your marriage better all the things that you would ever want to know to begin with about rebuilding a new life um is in this free podcast called the gift of the mormon faith crisis and i called it the gift of the mormon faith crisis because what i learned from it is that as horrific people don't like the term faith crisis they say it's not a faith crisis i had a truth crisis i turned out learned that the church was a fraud and then i realized what was true and they don't want it framed as a faith crisis and the thing that i always say is but it feels like a crisis at the time when you're going through it and your whole world is falling apart your identity is falling apart your morality your spirituality your family your marriage your community your roles your identity your vision of the afterlife believe me it feels like a crisis and it is rooted in your faith what what i have learned after 20 years of dealing in this space and after coaching or interacting with tens of thousands of people now that's not an exaggeration is that this can be the greatest gift that you could ever be given being a mormon turns out to have been not so bad in in in a lot of ways but also bad in a lot of ways but being leaving a religion can be the biggest gift of your lifetime you got this family you got this community you got this identity you got this education you got the socioeconomic status and then to leave it yeah it's a tough transition but coming out the other end and that's what thrive is all about coming out the other end you can have better mental health you can have better physical health you can have better marriages you can become a better parent you can have better friendships you can have a deeper more meaningful community you can trade up at every level such that all you all you know to do if you can reach this point is to say thank you and this is like going to blow the mind and cause outrage in so many people listening right now who aren't there right you can reach the point where you say thank you mormon church for all that you did to help me get to where i am now yes because how i feel right now this is john deland talking in 2021 in april of 2021 i feel like the most fortunate human ever and i don't mean that in hubris yeah i don't mean that in pride i've i'm i'm personally i've lost a ton of weight i'm physically healthier than i was 20 25 years ago i eat better i don't sleep better but that's another story um i've got a better marriage with my wife now way better marriage than i had when i was active in believing mormon i believe that my kids would all say i'm a better dad now than i ever was before and i have better friends deeper friendships better community like a fulfilling job and it's not prosperity gospel i'm not talking about money no not talking about power i am just talking about the refiners fire of a faith crisis what mormonism gave me and then what i've been able to build after it based on the mormonism that raised me has has left me feeling very very grateful now i'm not a woman i don't know i didn't i wasn't a woman in a patriarchy i was never raped or assaulted like a woman might i was never i'm not a person of color like i'm not an lgbt person that was taught that their core sexuality was evil or sinful like i understand that it was a lot of privilege that allows me to look back with gratitude hold on go ahead take over but you sacrificed more by leaving that privilege behind that's to be acknowledged you had the most to lose by leaving a system that was rigged your way right and i will also add to all this beautiful stuff you're saying context matters to come out again just being a uh just a guru who's just regurgitating things but you don't have the context is important as the world is being asked to evolve is humanity is being asked to evolve having people come from such extreme left-brained systems religious or capitalist doesn't matter having the people come from that context and pioneer this is going to trigger but this is you honoring pioneer ancestry and that dna in your blood by saying they stopped here i'm gonna go here and keep moving this needle and so for anyone who's in the space where they're angry at the church honor the context it has given you to grow and continue to bring humanity to a heart-centered place if you know how cold it is over here in left-brain logical no emotions everything suppressed and you pioneer within yourself the near neurological pathways for not just yourself but for your posterity to move it into a heart centered living what a beautiful journey that is honor yourself what a beautiful art that's a mythological journey of a hero right there so you can be angry at the church grieve it i'm not telling you don't grieve it go through the grieving process and as you come out of it you will honor the context and the platform from which you came and be able to honor how much you have grown from there and when i talk to fully ex-mormons who are attempting to thrive and to actuate fully actuate i really do view sort of graduation from ex-mormonism or post-mormonism as the ability to look back at the mormon church and to say thank you yeah thank you for all you gave me because there was good there was as much as people don't want to admit it there was a ton of good we wouldn't have stayed if there wasn't good it would yeah it would have never been if it wasn't any good we would never would have stayed for anything so there has to be some good in there so you so the pinnacle when you i think when you've really grown and matured and become the phoenix rising from the ashes when you've thrived you have been able to look back at the church and not just say it was all evil and all bad and all toxic and all you know you say thank you for all the good and thank you for all the hard because it led to additional growth and so the for me the pinnacle the graduation from ex-mormonism or post-mormonism is is looking back with gratitude is the seventh principle of perseverance which is the last one in my book for a reason which is what you talk is the graduation which is gratitude and forgiveness forgiveness and gratitude it's the same thing we're just using different words but basically the same thing if not the same words anyway and so for giving forgiving the mormon church or the flds church or the all red group how what does that mean what does that look like it just means being able to say thank you so much for the context you've given me to be able to grow from here and go on a hero's journey around the world literally around the world yeah and to learn so many things from this extreme position to this extreme position has given me so many pearls of wisdom for myself that i am now able to be in a position to pass on to others and so that truly is alpha being able to do something so uncomfortable as acidic as it originally sounds you mean i gotta tell those [ __ ] thank you that's a very difficult thing to do false bravado 1980 alpha male would never do that a new alpha is able to sit there and say i see the beauty of this entire journey and i have true gratitude for it yeah and i'm sure there's going to be people that are like i'm not there yet that's okay that's okay and i would tell people who aren't there yet you cannot fast forward the grieving cycle yeah there is no set timeline for the grieving cycle you have to go through all of them there are no shortcuts but as you know refiners fire that grieving cycle is the most powerful ride of passage that we can experience in this life so don't run away from it go through it as painful as it is lean in to the discomfort with acceptance and compassion and integrity and accountability accountability all of it yes yeah to emerge with forgiveness and gratitude through your transformation listeners viewers the book is the new alpha male how to win the game when the rules are changing by lance allred i just want to say i almost didn't do today's interview because i had i had the thought in my mind i'll just tell you this lance now on camera and then we can talk about it afterwards one of the most transformational books in my life and with margie was a new earth um a new earth you know came out around 2007 oprah made a big deal about it and uh you know it's basically secular buddhism yeah through the lens of eckhart tolle another great podcast of secular buddhism that my friend noah rashetta but you know it's it's wisdom and like you said jesus was the greatest buddhist there was and so so like you can even um apply this to christianity but but all this transformational stuff can be found in christianity if you're looking for it yeah it can be found in the book of mormon if you're looking for it it can be found in in um you know lots of places but the bible um what i was going to say is i was i was loving this book is so dense or thick and i don't mean that in a pejorative way there's so much wisdom in every paragraph that i'm thinking we can't you know this just re you reading the book is what six seven hours six hours but to like really explore it and to you know it's gonna it you know takes it could be like 60 000 words can you believe that yeah it says can't be more than 60 000 words i'm like i could talk for a while but we got to condense this bad boy no but there's not there's just there's laying it out but then there's a plot exploring it and and applying it it's it's a multi-season podcast and so i already mentioned this to you in a phone call what i what what oprah and eckhart did is they they sold the book but then they did 10 podcast episodes where for each of the book chapters they would basically do like a book club where they would say okay listeners they did this all of oprah's imagine all of oprah's audience you know we're talking millions of people okay listening audience read chapter one and then what we're going to do is eckhart and oprah are going to hold a a live video chat they're going to lay out some of the main principles and then listeners are going to call in and and share their reactions to the chapter interesting and their discussions of the chapter and they did that over ten chapters and there's so many people when they read a new earth they're like okay i can kind of see what eckhart was saying here they listened to it but then when they listened to the oprah and eckhart discussion of each chapter as a companion to the book along with the call-ins people calling in and applying it and exploring it in different from different points of view and perspectives it's a much more comprehensive and meaningful experience than just reading reading the book and or listening to the book so i i'm just gonna put this out into the universe maybe it'll happen maybe it won't i think it would be a huge gift to the world you would be a huge gift to the world to consider starting a podcast around the idea of call alpha male call it confronting toxic masculinity talk call it the new masculinity with lance allred but that's where we redefined we can figure out masculinity defined whatever it is but where it's basically you're taking on a paragraph of this book or a chapter of this book or how a few pages and i think there's multi seasons of a podcast here where you could really because men need role models for this men you know i'll give you an example like jordan peterson who i actually have respect for his intellect yeah intellectually he's very smart and for many of the principles that he has talked about but jordan peterson is also sort of been collapsed what's that emotionally is a is a different thing yeah there there probably is some opportunities for growth there in terms of emotion but also you know whether it's jordan peterson or who's the youtuber conservative youtuber guy uh harvard grad oh um not ben uh ben shapiro yeah like there's a lot of these thinkers have been really co-opted by the right right and that's not bad like but what we're saying here is it's not about right or left no it's not about republican or democrat it's not about trump or biden it's about something in the middle something that's integrated i'm going to enter and what we don't have is someone who's not not the reaction to jordan peterson no or ben shapiro somebody and i think sam harris is trying to do this some yeah but we need male we need leaders in for men and for women who are trying to navigate that middle ground non-partisan non-political not you know extreme non-extreme not hating religion right but not a slave to religion i i appreciate the invite and uh let's talk more on it and i will add i'm so bad glad you brought up the middle because in the myth of the holy grail percival who found the holy grail his name in old french literally translates to through the middle through the middle is how we find the holy grail which is enlightenment or whatever words you want to use that's the myth the holy grail people think it's discover the myth is the metaphor it's enlightenment or nirvana or whatever but percival is through the middle that's what it means so not in neither extremes or in absolutes but through the middle so i'm glad you brought that up and uh and that's what we need i think that's what we need politically like my parents every time i bring up politics they're like uh uh you know the the old conversation was like trump and then they're like i hate biden now i'm like how about i hate partisanship that's what i say now well i don't think trump is the enemy i don't think biden is the enemy i don't think trump's the savior i don't think biden's the savior the enemy is partisanship yeah the savior is bipartisanship it's the the enemy isn't religion per se and the savior isn't secularism and even in your book you try and talk about a new spirituality even if it's mother earth or sense of meaning and purpose right what if the solution isn't this dichotomous warlike us and them tribalism right but some type of some type of integrating unification uh that comes through the middle way yeah it's through the middle yes that's how we bring it together but that it really is whether you know western logic is external uh eastern logic says crisis christ consciousness but that's very much through the middle if you really steady and sit it it's it's sit with it it's through the middle that's much of his teachings and um so i'm glad you're bringing that up but that's so much but that is again that is the message that the athlete is teaching when we're in the zone when we're heart-centered we're in the middle we're masculine and we're feminine so next time you watch a basketball game notice that lesson yeah i love it all right everyone the book is uh the new alpha male uh available in hardback at amazon and barnes and noble and wherever books are sold um how to win the game when the rules are changing by lance allred there's also an audio version of this book that i listened to that i paid for kindle and audible it's all there and then how do people follow you if they want to support what you do oh yeah as lance allred 41 uh is the handle for all the social media outlets my jersey number 41. lance all right 40. gmail as well is there yeah yeah yeah yeah all that sorry 41 at gmail or lance atlanta at 41.com um yeah that's that's how you get a hold of me is universal across the board lands all right 41. and um i appreciate this opportunity and i have loved to um coming back to you you what four years now four years later and just seeing and noticing and feeling how much you continually grow and how you have moved through the grieving cycle and your energy is lighter physically you're lighter and it's just beautiful to see and i'm so glad that you're in a position to not just be talking but to walking in beauty for people who follow you and you're doing a wonderful job and i have to commend you with that well thank you yeah thank you and as i read this book i felt i have a long long way to go because i still struggle with acceptance with compassion with forgiveness i still have things to learn about accountability and integrity and transformation so i'm i'm just saying i'm i'm way still on the journey brother and this book is gonna always will be yeah i will yes again it's a way of life it's not a system it's just a way of life not an arrival station right yeah you know lots of train stations to revive that that will continue to take us elsewhere well thanks for helping me on my journey lance thank you and listeners thanks for joining us hope you've enjoyed this give lance your kudos you can hire him as a public speaker he he speaks at corporations and events and conferences all over the country and world you can buy his book you can follow him on social media and and follow he can watch his ted talk you can share his stuff everywhere support lance and thanks for supporting me donors make all this possible uh thank you to everyone who makes the open stories foundation and warmer stories podcast possible one out of a thousand of my listeners or viewers actually donate i'm losing donors and viewers all the time because of covid and people just lose interest and graduate move on which is good so if you want to see programming like this continue please become a monthly donor and i'll do this for as long as there's support and when there's no longer support i'll go do other cool stuff that's probably a little bit less painful so thanks everyone for joining us love you guys thanks again lance and you take care okay brother thank you john

Channel: Mormon Stories Podcast

Views: 8,541

Rating: 4.78125 out of 5

Keywords: lds, mormon, Masculinity, Lance Allred, NBA

Id: BYUphGAB1ug

Length: 184min 7sec (11047 seconds)

Published: Wed May 19 2021