The Father
Swell AI Transcript: S1 E7.wav
Tyler All right, welcome to the Lost Boy Scouts podcast. I'm Tyler. And I'm Danny.
Danny Thanks for joining us for episode seven. Yeah, good to see everybody. It's been quite a week. We've had a lot of good up and downs and quickly, just to recap the week, Tyler and I ran that trail series, the Park City Trail Series over the weekend. My first 5K, I've never done anything like that before. We set a pace that we wanted, kind of smashed that out of the water and then felt it for the next couple of days.
Tyler My feet still kind of hurt. Right? Yeah, congratulations on your first race, by the way. Thank you. It's fun. I could tell competitive Danny comes out. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. There's a couple hills I was chasing you up.
Danny I was like, whoa, Danny's turning it on. I was telling Misty today, I was like, in my mind, I was like, well, I've never done it before. I got there, I was a little antsy, not that bad. Then once it started, we were both, where should we go? Should we go to the front? Should we go to the second wave? Then we settled on the third wave. I realized quickly that we probably should have been like you thought, further ahead
Tyler because we were trying to catch everybody. It's hard at first, right? Because you're on a trail and you've got to separate people a little bit and make your way through.
Danny The trail conditions because of all the snow were already pretty rough. And they told us that. They said there's going to be some ruts out there. So I thought about that. But as we started going, we were trying to navigate ourselves and then we got into a pretty good clip. And I was looking down and I was like, man, we're going really fast. And our goal was, or I told you my goal would like to be under 30 minutes. And we had rarely gotten even close to 30 on our training runs. And so as we were going, Tyler kept saying, man, we are doing really good on our pace. And we ended up just under just shy of 30 minutes. We did. Both of us. And I think we were in the top 100 of competitors.
Tyler I think. Yeah. I think we both were, you know, and we hit our under 30 minute goals. So good for us. You got to push yourself to do hard things. It does say a lot like the right vibe. You get around the vibe. Yeah. You know, we weren't running 30 minute training sessions. Our training sessions, I think, were a lot harder. But we got around the vibe of everybody else.
Danny And it was fun. It was a good experience for myself. I don't think so. We have two races left of our series. There's a 10 K and then a half marathon, I think is what they call it. Half marathon. Yeah. Well, Tyler and I were saying we're still going to have a goal but not to be sore the way that I was.
Tyler I was so sore. I wanted to, and you can't get tattooed next time.
Danny I wanted to sit in the canal after. Yeah. Oh yeah. We couldn't sit in the canal because I had gotten tattooed. Yeah. And I ran off to open mat because we had a big open mat. Yeah. That day. That's right. You went down there. And so I trained on Sunday and it was a really good training. And Monday I was so wrecked. And then Tuesday I think I felt even worse and then starting to feel better now and I feel like we'll get back to training and get back to running. And so yeah, we have that coming up. We have our competition on July 8th. So Tyler and I will be doing grappling industries with our team. A bunch of guys from the Park City Academy July 8th. And I think we're both gearing up for that because we're going to have to run different because they run on Saturday and we compete on Saturday and we both decided that we're
Tyler just going to compete, probably do like a virtual run. Yeah. Nothing compares to the last competition I did as far as soreness. I remember.
Danny And yeah. It was an interesting… Competition is an interesting thing and that's kind of where I have gone to Tyler about this next episode because as you guys knew that we're listening and that train with us, I was helping my younger son get ready for Worlds. And competition brings out a lot of different feelings, a lot of different emotions for myself because I've helped both of my kids train for some very high level grappling competitions. Yeah. My older boy, he tried out for the World Team. He went to the World Team trials. I coached him in that and then Tristan with this last one. And it brings out a lot of emotions for me because there's two different dads that they got. And I told Tyler that it's interesting for me because I grew up without my dad. And so we talked about where you go as a father, how you grow as a father. And Tristan didn't get to his goal. He wasn't able to make the weight so we had to cancel the trip and that in itself brought
Tyler so much emotions and so luckily I called Tyler. I would imagine, and I've been in similar situations with my son, but as a father you know you can exercise so much external discipline and you can give as much as that child needs but ultimately it's got to come back to the internal discipline. And where is the line?
Danny So the concept of father, today's episode is the father. The father. I tell my kids, you love hanging out with your dad. You love being around your dad. You do not want to see your father. Your father is the guy that's going to be the disciplinarian. He's going to be the one that you're not going to really get along with that much because he has to be this stoic figure that has to instill certain characteristics that are required
Tyler of our children through our own rights. And there's one, we're going to go through several different archetypes of fathers. When we think about daddy, that's the infant stage of child, raising your children. Father is always the disciplinarian. There's dad. Dad is kind of like, hey, he's the guy you can trust. You can go get information from the safe, solid figure. You have to play these different roles and the different narratives each title of father kind of brings with you. And it's interesting too because if you look at it from a religious perspective, you have the concept of the father, which is always the disciplinarian. The priest is the father. The father is this omnipotent person we don't really understand, but we know that all we do is disappoint him.
Danny Yeah, and you wonder if your kids think that… Is it an attainable level? Is it an attainable level because my boys, they both call me… My older son calls me dad and Tristan always calls me pops and he's like, calls me pop. My pop is this and I always find that interesting because my dad called his dad pop and in turn I call my dad pop even though we don't have a father-son relationship. My dad and I don't really have a father-son relationship because he was there for a good portion of my youth until I was about 10 years old and then he was gone and we almost didn't talk for about 10 years. We didn't speak to each other. And it was an interesting thing to, as a youth, to know is that an attainable? Is it attainable? Do you want to be like your father? Do you want to be like your dad?
Tyler Because there were parts of my dad that I didn't want to be like at all. Yeah, I think that's the interesting intertwining of the father-son relationship, right? I came across this cool quote from Frederick Nietzsche. It says, what is silent in the father speaks in the son and is often found in the son, the unveiled secret of the father. It's kind of heavy, right? From German Nietzsche. I was always a fan because I felt like, if you know who Nietzsche is, you seem super pseudo-intellectual. Yeah, for sure.
Danny Sometimes somebody asks you, you're like, oh, I know, I read that.
Tyler Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that is, that's like, what do we pass down to our son? What do we as sons, what do we see, what do we inherit from our fathers? There is kind of this shadow that we inherit, whether we realize it or not, that we inherit from our fathers. Sometimes we have the father, when we talk about the father archetypes, right? We grew up in a world where we no longer really saw the father go to work in the field. We didn't see the fruit of his labor. We knew that he worked, right? We knew he provided for the family, but we were at home, you know, consuming this instant gratification life. Yeah, for sure. And so we have a lot we need to kind of reconcile. And sometimes what we saw of our father was, you know, maybe some of the negatives, the darkness, the shadows, his anger. And what that does is it leaves an imprint on us. And our goal as fathers and as men is to become better than the previous version, right? It's funny how your dad is probably the only person, when you get better than him, that's
Danny cheering for you. Yeah, it's so true. Yeah, and you always hear that. You always like hope that your own children attain a better or a higher level than you. And in return, you want to attain a higher level than your parents, especially your dad, especially your father. But what usually happens, I believe, is like we put our dads on this pedestal, right? We put them on this like level because we think they're never supposed to make mistakes. They're never there. There's guys that go to work every day. They do the right thing. And when they make mistakes, we almost hold them to this like level of frustration and myself like I'd get frustrated because my dad would make these mistakes. And I think, what? Why would you? Why would you do that? Why would you make these mistakes? But in all reality, he's just another human. He's just another man that makes mistakes. We expect our own children to give us breaks to cut us slack, right? Like, hey, man, sorry about that. I should have done that. I apologize to you. And it's an interesting thing. It's an interesting dynamic because of this lack of father, dad in my own eyes. But he was there. He was there. He had certain characteristics that he put into me in those times. And I'm like, man, I sound just like my dad.
Tyler That's interesting because as I've kind of done some of my own work, kind of building my own emotional intelligence, I've had to really revisit the relationship with father, right? Like, there are these archetypes of fathers, right? There's the alcoholic father that's violent. And that can leave an imprint on a child that's very negative, right? There's the father that's so perfect that he makes all the money he provides for the family. He's just this icon in the community. How do I live up to that image, father, right? So and then there's the father that is just maybe he goes to work, he plops down on the sofa and mom makes all the decisions, right? The passive father, right? And so what are we learning from our fathers? What do we integrate from our fathers? What work do we need to go back and look at and sit with and think, do the work to actually say, what did my father leave me? What did his anger look like? How does his anger show up in my relationship with my children? Right. You know, what was his relationship with finances? How did he treat women? We have to sit down and look at where we got some of this stuff. And a lot of that does come from the father, right? And like you said, a lot of times we put the fathers on the pedestal. Right. I, like you, my relationship with my father was very much a wave. It had highs and it had lows. My parents split when I was fairly young. And so a lot of the narrative that I heard about my father was what my mother would, you know, stories my mother would tell. And I don't know that she necessarily had a corrector or good or, you know, she had her experience and she imparted upon me her experience. And what I saw from my father was very different than what I experienced was very different. And so what I've had to go back and do is kind of do this kind of reconciliation. Look at like, you know, exactly, look exactly what does my anger look like? Yeah.
Danny Right. Yeah. Where did that come from? And you, as you go in and you start to, because some people may, man, they may not even resonate with you and I because they had such a great experience with their dads that they may be lucky that I had that, that I had this relationship with my dad because I believe like the relationship with your father needs to be a strong, a strong relationship, a strong, and you need to have strong core values from your dad. Even though my dad was not around, I believe he still has strong values that his family generationally passed on, which subsequently passed on to me. Right. My parents, they divorced pretty early in my life and then my dad was gone. He was just gone. He was just not there, which had its own effects on me and my relationship with people because I was angry. I was very angry right away. Right. But as you grow and as you look back and you think about these things and you look at your core values, you look at the things that are passed on to you, you got them from somewhere. Right. You do the work, you put in the time and you realize that most of these things come genetically, some genetic code, whatever was passed from your grandpa to your dad. It's a genetic code, right? And so that's how I look at it. And then we make small adjustments, small tweaks to our own children. We have this, I tell my kids all the time, you have two different dads. Yeah. It's not true. I mean, it's the way that I say it because I had Braxton when I was 18. So right out of high school, we had him and I had no idea. I was in such a searching place of myself. Yeah. I had no idea how to raise. You couldn't give what you didn't have. Oh man. And I was terrified that I was going to be like my dad. In all reality, I was a lot like my dad.
Tyler You can't prevent it. Yeah. There's a nature to it, right? And it's not a bad thing, right? We can learn via negativa in kind of in the areas of saying, hey, maybe my dad had this habit and I don't want that. Yeah. But we still absorb so much from those informative years of them raising us that it's inevitable that we are going to pick up those traits. Right. But how do we reconcile? Because I think one of the natural aspects of a son is to rebel. To rebel against the father. And you have to. I think it's part of a rite of passage to rebel against your father. Find your own way.
Danny And then eventually, I think you circle back. Yeah. You complete the circle. You complete the circle. Professor said that the other day in Jiu-Jitsu. He was talking about completing the circle. He was talking about a Judo throw. And it kind of resonated with me with life because everything does circle back. Everything comes back to a point that you started and you kind of go on your own travel like you're talking about. Back in the day, we talked about this the first episode, sons used to go on their own. If you were Native American, you went on your own walkabout. You went with other men who taught you these qualities of the tribe or whatever they thought your father entrusted them. But then you would circle back and you would come back to your dad and hopefully you learn these great traits and these great things that your dad could just now help solidify and to help refine these things. And it was interesting to me to be able to circle back and think about those things because you do. You do rebel against your father.
Tyler You do. 100%. I mean, you have to. And I think that's a great thing about the nature to kind of challenge what he has taught you because again, I think naturally we as humans, we're curious, right? And we have to figure things out on our own to an extent, right? Once we've experienced a hot stove or somebody experienced hot stove, we don't necessarily have to do that. But that requires a certain level of emotional maturity, which we don't always have, especially in our teenage years. When we really start to rebel, when we really start to see. And it's interesting because we live in a society we now do, we're no longer hunter-gatherer, we're more consumerist, right? We don't have those rites of passage, right? We don't see our fathers, you know, cobbling shoes. We don't see our dad working in the field. We don't see our dad laying bricks or being a blacksmith. Right. A lot of dads do intellectual work, right? And that doesn't necessarily, I don't mean to devalue it, but I think it's important for us to see our fathers as sons, to see our fathers doing that work. I think one of the greatest gifts my father gave me, he was a very hard worker. He was, you know, painted houses his whole life and he worked really, really hard. And I'm sure that wasn't something he was incredibly passionate about, but he was good at it. He had it down to a science and, you know, he worked hard at it and he provided for a family. And, you know, to a level that is kind of the requirement, you know, to be a father is you have to provide. Right. You know, but I also remember some, you know, his anger being very, you know, being very volatile. Yeah. Right? I took his truck for a little joyride one summer's eve while he was out of town and he drove this beautiful Ford F350. Yeah. You know, lifted on 37s. And of course, you know, my buddy got his truck stuck. Oh, man. And I was like, I know how we can get it out. My dad was a painter. He carried tons of paint on the back of his truck. And my teenage brain didn't even think, you know, I just fired that baby up. You could follow the paint trail from when the paint fell over the back to where we went all the way back to your house, right into the driveway. And I just remember, you know, he tanned my hide. Yeah, he was not happy. He was not happy. Yeah. You know, because it was, it was, it was, to me, it was fun. To him, it was business, right? It was work. It was lost profits in the paint. As a teenager, I just didn't, I didn't see it. I just saw a pretty bad-ass truck I wanted to drive.
Danny And you met your father. Yeah. He tuned you up. Yeah, he did. Yeah, that's, that's so funny because, you know, and I'm sure your dad has like his own version of that story of what he felt he needed to teach you a lesson on because could you imagine if it was somebody else's truck or something else happened or something? Or let's say like something worse had happened, you know, like. Exactly. I love that, like, too, because my dad, he definitely had a temper, but he was like a leader. He, in his, in his job, he was in the military. He was 20 plus years in the military, right? And his dad, military, they all were very, they were military driven. He would take us to the, to his barracks because he was a drill sergeant and he would have us come to work with him. And I remember seeing him and thinking, man, what a man he could control a room. And I think I have that, that ability to from myself, like, I think I can control it. And so I had to get it from somewhere, right? And so he did pass on some, some good qualities. Yeah. I, I definitely never got disciplined by my dad because he just wasn't there, you know? Yeah. And so I had to learn the hard way. She, she did a good job, but I also had a lot of very strong men around me. Yeah. So like that idea that I had my grandpas, I had my uncles. Yeah. And they, they would for sure tune me up if I got out of line and push me to do other things, which was, was great. I'm grateful for them because my life could have been completely different had I not had these strong men who still to this day, I can remember them correcting me very clearly
Tyler about life. It's interesting. And you probably have examples of this from the wrestling map, but like, I remember coaching lacrosse specifically in the youth, the, the boys who, who had single mothers whose moms were dropping them off, picking them up. You know, I remember them challenging me. I remember them, you know, sometimes standing too close or like they, they were looking for that figure. You know, and a lot of it just had to do with the father wasn't there full time, right? Like getting your father part-time, it's not enough, right? It's not enough. It's one of the biggest heartbreaks in my life, right? You know, not being able to be there and nurture and care for this thing that I've created and they're looking for it. They need it, especially in the eight, nine, 10 year range. I really do believe that they, they, they need, you know, they need those mentors. Yeah, for sure. And they can get it. We, I just wonder if it has to do with the fact that communities are so hard to find
Danny these days. Yeah. Well, and so, yes, you're right. So in the wrestling community, you have these, so in the wrestling community, your dad, most of the time becomes your coach. And it's not that the coach doesn't want to help you, but a lot of times the coach will the really the tough relationships are the father son. Some guys pull it off. Some dads can pull it off. My older son I was good with. Tristan, not so good with him. And I, we have like a really the same kind of personality, but you would, you would see these younger kids who, who didn't have that same thing kind of gravitate towards you. And what happens then is you can practice different skillsets, different things on these young men and start to change how you handle your own children on the mat. I did not coach Tristan very long in wrestling just because it just, it wasn't working out.
Tyler We weren't. Well, I think that's true. You, you need some help at some point. You need to help. I think I reached the same level with Ben, like where I knew that perhaps I was pushing him in a direction that, that, you know, I couldn't coach him anymore. I just couldn't coach him because I was pushing my dream or my expectation of him, of what I was hoping he would become, right? Like living vicariously through him. Very talented young man. You know, I.
