LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherIn this FINAL episode, we close out Jon’s story the way any hero’s arc should end: with Jon having faced his Dark Night of the Soul, now ready to change. He’s always wanted safety, and controlled people to get that safety. In this last chapter, he finds a better way. THIS IS THE FINAL EPISODE OF THE IMPOSSIBLE MAN PODCAST. Be sure to subscribe below so you don’t miss future updates on the project!REMEMBER: Although the podcast is over, the podcast existed in the first place so tease the larger project we’re working on together: Jon’s book, which may or may not be called The Impossible Man. Be sure to subscribe at JohnnyBTruant.com so we can let you know when the book is finish!TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS:NOTE: The transcript below was generated by AI and has not been edited. Accordingly, some things below are a little weird … but you’re smart, so I’m confident you can figure it out. SPEAKER AAs they drained my control, it let out and made visible who I really was.SPEAKER BAnd who was that?SPEAKER AAn absolute control freak. The worst they had ever seen in 60 years.SPEAKER BWelcome to The Impossible Man, the true story of how the inability to move allowed one person to tradehis humanity for ODS defying superpowers and how he clawed his way back. Hey, everybody, andwelcome to the final episode of The Impossible Man. The last episode was pretty rough, but that is parfor the course before the hero learns the lesson and ascends from the darkness. And that's ultimatelywhat we're going to be covering this episode. Remember, the entire arc for John was a journey, basicallyfrom the need for control, to trust and faith. And we're going to cover that in this episode. He needed tobe safe, and this is how he attempted to get it. So let's begin with this final episode of The ImpossibleMan. All right, so when we last left off, you were in a very dark place. We heard the story of this brutalrape and what it did to both hummingbird your girlfriend and to your relationship and then to you. Sothat's where we're starting this as we finish this overview of your story. So I assume that the relationshipfell apart and you broke up and you were this broken person. Is that where we began?SPEAKER AMore or less. That's where. So even though she realized what she saw and experienced wasn't real, shestill remembered it and she still had the trauma from her not real experiences. She knew how illogical thatwas, but it doesn't matter. She experienced it. And that trauma caused her intense anxiety even to bearound me.SPEAKER BThis is a little like if somebody wakes up from a bad dream and is mad at you because of something thathappened in the dream, but it didn't actually happen, but that they still feel that way for a while. And itsounds like even if intellectually, she understood. But she was having this emotional memory of youhunting down and killing the people that she loved.SPEAKER AIs that correct? Yeah. Her experiences where she saw me torture and kill people she had loved or to bemore accurate, to order them.SPEAKER BTortured and killed, did she go to therapy around that?SPEAKER AOh, yeah, lots and lots of therapy. And she knew by the end of it, she had reached a point to where shehad made clear dividing lines about what was real, what wasn't. But all of that trauma was still with her.And she told me, I love you with every molecule in my body, but if I stay with you, I feel like I'm nevergoing to heal and I need to move on. You need to move on. I'm going to move and try to restart mycareer. And if you love me, you will never come looking for me. Wow.SPEAKER BSo throughout this story, you've been bulletproof and confident and sure that you could do anyimpossible thing that was put in front of you. How much of a hit did that take?SPEAKER ADuring this, it was the only time in my life that I couldn't get out of bed, that I didn't want to work. I didn'twant to see anyone. I wept all day, every day, for months. I was completely broken. And I started reachingout to a lot of girls, and even though I was a complete mess, not tried to date them, but just try to sleepwith them. And in the span of three months, I probably slept with twelve girls. One of them was a pornstar. I still had all of my old skills, except I now had no filter. I didn't do anything to harm any of thosegirls. I never lied to them. I told them I was not looking for a relationship. I was just looking for sex. And,guys, it'll shock you. There are a lot of women out there that are totally okay. What they want is you, to behonest about it. At the same time, it wasn't healthy at all. And eventually, a mutual friend of ours, DavidGonzalez, I was telling him about my life, and he just said, John, this isn't you, man.SPEAKER BI'm assuming that you had some degree of that control tendency that had loosened up a little bit whileyou were with hummingbird. Did it all come slamming back? Was there this almost vindicated feeling of,you know what? I was right all along. I shouldn't have relaxed my control. I should have tried to stay safe.SPEAKER ASleeping with other girls was about control, because my objective was to sleep with them. And I'm notsaying this is good. I was in a dark time in my life. My objective was to sleep with them on the very firstdate. And so it was, how many girls can I sleep with on the very first date?SPEAKER BAnd you applied, I assume, all the same sort of impossible strategies that you've had all along, that sameforce of.SPEAKER AWill to my credit. Like I said, I was never dishonest. By the way, this is another secret to anyone, any kindof dating, to tell the other person exactly what you want. I would tell them on the very first day, this isexactly what I want. Are you down for that? And about third of the women said, no way, and that was theend of the date. The other two thirds of the women said, Maybe. Let's keep talking.SPEAKER BThis is through, like, dating apps?SPEAKER ANo, this is in person.SPEAKER BSo you were still getting out because this was pandemic times, right? This was, like, 2021, something likethat?SPEAKER AIt was right before it. So, yeah, I was attempting to feel some sort of control. By how many women could Iget to sleep with me over the span of a few hours while being completely, 100% honest. I would even tellthem about Comingbird. I wasn't hiding anything.SPEAKER BWell, so control was a strategy for you to feel safe. So did you feel safe at all?SPEAKER ANo.SPEAKER BEven though you were controlling everything, did you just keep trying to ramp up the control in an effort tofeel that again?SPEAKER AYeah, I think there was some of that. I was crucially unaware at the time, but I would say yes.SPEAKER BSo David was the one who saw this. You were not going to see it on your own, is that correct? At least notat this time?SPEAKER AYeah, he came to me. He knew about the breakup and everything that has happened with comingbird andhe knew I was messed up. But then he started to see all of this and he told me, rather than do what you'redoing, just, is it helping? And I said no. He said, well, would you be open to a different approach? And Isaid yes.SPEAKER BSo you didn't resist? You didn't tell him he was crazy, that he didn't know what he was talking about, anyof that?SPEAKER ANo. And it's because he was very close friend. He had already earned my trust. I knew he had my bestinterests at heart. And he said, there's a group, invitation only group of guys who are all very successful toget together and they talk about their problems. There are no therapists, it's just a group of guys. But it's areally cool group.SPEAKER BWas it that simple? Was it literally just a group of guys who just decided that they needed this supportnetwork?SPEAKER AWhat I learned when I went there is that there's a movement among some men that have realized thatmen have become emotionally stunted and that it causes all sorts of problems in our lives. And there aregroups around this. Like Lionheart is one of those groups. I never went to Lionheart, but this is very similarprocess. And the idea is that we've been through trauma, learned all the wrong lessons, and now we can'tseem to progress forward as men because we're no longer in control.SPEAKER BTrauma is so that idea of learning all the wrong lessons is something that we talked briefly about before.Can you give me an example of what that means, to go through trauma and learn all the wrong lessons?SPEAKER AYeah. So after my stepfather, I learned if I'm not in charge, no one is safe. With hummingbird, I think thelesson I learned was, my life is over, it's time to die.SPEAKER BSo you were learning that lesson subconsciously. And then when David came in, I assumed that therewas some degree of, well, this person sees it differently and I trust him and he cares about me. Was therethat kind of thing?SPEAKER AYeah. And he was asking me to go hang out with some guys and he just said, try it and see what youthink.SPEAKER BAnd so I did what did you think?SPEAKER AI wept like a baby. Told them the story, and each man in the group just gave me a hug. They didn't sayanything. They didn't judge me. I did the same for them. And I noticed that I didn't feel alone. I still feltlike shit, but I didn't feel alone.SPEAKER BHow long did you attend that group?SPEAKER AOver a year. Every week. I never missed a meeting.SPEAKER BHow did that end? Did you just sort of get to the point where you were like, okay, I'm ready to move on?Thank you.SPEAKER AEventually, the other members of the group started to move, and it just sort of dwindled. And by thatpoint, I'd already spent hundreds of hours, not 1000 hours, talking to these men. And I'd started tobecome much more in touch with my emotions. One of the exercises they gave beginning members wasto set a 15 minutes alarm on your watch that goes off every 15 minutes, then write down what you'refeeling when it goes off.SPEAKER BWhat did you discover through that process?SPEAKER AInitially, this is what most men discover. I knew I was feeling something, but I didn't know what to writedown, didn't know how to put it into words. And so I literally had to describe the sensations in my bodywithout understanding what those emotions were.SPEAKER BDid you begin to then learn to put name to them? I mean, was that the idea that you would all become alittle more aware?SPEAKER AYeah, I took my descriptions. This is what I felt to these men, and they explained to me, oh, that's grief orthat's depression or that's whatever. And so I started to put names.SPEAKER BWas there any degree to which your earlier emotional research I'm thinking of the summer of 300 moviesbegan to jibe or gel or support this? Was there any concordance there that was.SPEAKER ARecognizing emotions in other people? With a slight bit of self awareness about my own. But during thisprocess, I learned a very nuanced view of precisely what it means to feel lots of different things.SPEAKER BHow is your control equal safety thing working during this phase?SPEAKER AI let it go gradually. Took a while.SPEAKER BAllowing more and more cases where you weren't entirely in control?SPEAKER AYeah, where I would just lose it in front of my friends.SPEAKER BHow scary was that at the time.SPEAKER AWhen I lost control? Not very. But after, it was like, oh, my God, now everyone's going to leave me. And itdidn't happen. If anything, they felt closer to me.SPEAKER BSo did it work a little like aversion therapy on that particular axis where you're exposed to a potential oran actual loss of control over and over again to the point where your brain says, maybe I'm still safe evenif I'm not in control?SPEAKER AThere was some of that, yeah, for sure. And it was also what I said earlier about you cry until you've criedout all the tears. I cried out all the tears.SPEAKER BSo it was putting in the time.SPEAKER AYeah.SPEAKER BInterestingly. This process strikes me as very similar to what you used to do deliberately and consciouslywhen you wanted to learn to write headlines. You wrote hundreds of headlines and thousands ofheadlines, bulk action so that you wouldn't be ignorant. And it sounds to me like this is a very unwelcomebut cathartic or helpful version of that, where you just had to keep going into lack of control over and overagain and to learn that.SPEAKER AYeah. I also started experimenting with visualization exercises and breathing exercises, and in particular,what worked well for me was doing both at the same time, so doing these sort of like you do in yoga,different sorts of rhythmic breaths and at the same time do visualizations. There's something about, forme, the rhythmic breath that very quickly results in a loss of control of my emotion.SPEAKER BOh, a loss of control.SPEAKER AYeah.SPEAKER BYou were using the breath to I thought you were using the breath to feel control or to feel soothed, but it'sthe opposite.SPEAKER AThere's something and it has to be physically illogical. When you breathe in certain ways, it's like yournervous system opens up and something releases. And doing that, I would just cry and breathe, cry andbreathe, cry and breathe and relive the memories over and over and over and over again.SPEAKER BSo the breathing gave you the capacity to fully experience without resistance?SPEAKER AYeah, it became a part of my schedule, like it was on my schedule 2 hours a day. I had therapy. Thattherapy is breathing, visualization. And I had a teacher for a while, eventually. I mean, learning how tobreathe is not that complicated. I didn't need that many classes, but I just started doing that every day forlike, 2 hours.SPEAKER BDid that strategy teach you that? It's taught you they didn't need to be in control, that you could feel safe.Was that the end of the journey, now that you knew how to not be in control, that you were able to moveon and nothing else was necessary?SPEAKER AI still didn't realize that it was about control. You could even say that exercise was a way of being incontrol of.SPEAKER BMy trauma, basically, rather than surrendering to control, which is what it sounds like a little bit. You werelearning to master control. Control, yeah. Was that an epiphany? Was that something that was obvious toyou just after a year of exposure, or did somebody point it out?SPEAKER AIt didn't was David. I told David one day, I feel like I've plateaued. I made all of this progress. I feel muchbetter, but I still feel my business isn't growing. I don't feel like I'm growing, and I don't know what'smissing. And he invited me into a very controversial type of therapy that he had been through himself andhad a great experience. And at this point, I trusted him so much, I would have said yes to anything.SPEAKER BWell, who knew that David Gonzalez was such a psychology guru? Did you know that about him?Because I don't have that kind of knowledge of therapy and psychology. That's two times that he'sbasically saving you. Did you know that going in?SPEAKER AI'm not the only person he's done that for. He's done that for a lot of people. And David has graduallybecome an expert on trauma of all kinds and all the different therapies hundreds of therapies does.SPEAKER BHe study them like you do? I mean, I don't want to broach David's confidence, but it sounds like he's gotan encyclopedic knowledge.SPEAKER AI think so, yeah. And he's one of the wisest, most emotionally sensitive people on the planet that I've met.And he invited me into this and basically just said, go sign up for this. It lasts six months. It's $5,000.SPEAKER BSo you trusted David, but where was your trust issues, your ability to trust other people before going intothis?SPEAKER AJust as bad as ever. The only reason why I trusted David is he had seen me and be with me at theabsolute bottom and never abandoned me or judge me. So I trusted him at the time probably more thananyone, a lot.SPEAKER BDid you see trust as a virtue that you would like to acquire? Or was it something that you trusted Davidand you didn't trust other people? And that's just how it was.SPEAKER AThat's just how it was.SPEAKER BBecause I'm guessing the secret here is that trust is a piece that was missing.SPEAKER AIt was.SPEAKER BSo tell me about the therapy then. I mean, as much as you can.SPEAKER ASo this is a program called Ascension Leadership Academy, which is the next evolution of another verycontroversial program called Est that was shut down by the government, I think, after someonecommitted suicide. Not sure if that's quite right. I think it was something like that. I knew none of thatwhen I signed up. And the way it works is they give you experiences to trigger your trauma, and they areexperts at this. Those experiences, they have refined for over 60 years. They're as close to magic asanything I've ever seen, although there's nothing supernatural about them.SPEAKER BSo I know that there are some things that you can't reveal, kind of, because it's a magician's secret sort ofa thing. But what can you tell us?SPEAKER AI can tell you some things that were exclusive to me. They required that I not go with my caregivers to anyof their meetings.SPEAKER BAnd let me interject for listeners. Having spent a bunch of time with you, I don't know that people get this,and I don't want to speak for you, so tell me if I'm wrong, but you have caregivers around twenty fourseven, and it's things like your eyes are watering and you need your eyes wiped or something. Itches oryou need water. I mean, it's constant, right?SPEAKER AYeah.SPEAKER BAnd they wouldn't let you take anybody in with you, right. How long of a period of time are we talkingabout? It was this like an eight hour day and you did it for weeks on end?SPEAKER ATwelve hour days during the event. And then I was allowed to have my caregivers when I wasn't in anevent. But it was the first event. Three or four days?SPEAKER BI don't remember of twelve hour days.SPEAKER AYeah.SPEAKER BWhat was your reaction when you learned this?SPEAKER AAt first it was a hard note, and the owner of the company talked to me, or maybe it was one of theircoaches, and they said, listen, we want you to feel safe, but your caregivers are not going to be openingthemselves up emotionally about their trauma. And everyone else is in the room is, and it ruins the spacefor everyone. And it also makes other people wonder, can I really speak openly if there's this other personin the room who's not doing the same? And that made sense to me. And then they said, also, they can sitright outside the room. That can't be in the room with you. And your first weekend, David, the person Itrusted most in the world will be with you the whole time.SPEAKER BWas he going through it again or was he functioning as sort of a friend in the room?SPEAKER AAs a friend, because he had been through it.SPEAKER BNow, you said the first weekend, so does that mean there were times when David wasn't there?SPEAKER AThis is why I didn't know. I thought it was going to be the whole thing. It wasn't. They progressed this tonext. It was choose a buddy, David's, not here. Choose a buddy. And I chose a buddy, and they were withme for several days. The time after that, it was every day you choose a different buddy.SPEAKER BSo this was subsequent weekends. Basically, there were breaks between these?SPEAKER AYeah.SPEAKER BAnd did they know from the beginning that this was going to be a stepwise thing and maybe you wouldn'thave agreed and that they were tricking you to some degree?SPEAKER AI think so.SPEAKER BDo you think that the reason they gave you that caregivers couldn't be in the room? Was the entire truth?Or was it more that they knew that you had this control issue and were pulling in another trick?SPEAKER AI think they knew.SPEAKER BSo how did that go? I know David, you've already said enough good things about David. I'm sure that wentfine when he was acting as your caregiver. But how did it go the first time that that wasn't the case?SPEAKER AImagine that there's a person in a tank of water and the water is over their head and you can't see them,and they're interacting with you, telling you about themselves, but you can't see them. And then imaginethat slowly the water drains to where you can see them. As they drained my control, it let out and madevisible who I really was.SPEAKER BAnd who was that?SPEAKER AAn absolute control freak. The worst they had ever seen in 60 years.SPEAKER BIs this the first time that you really confronted that?SPEAKER AYeah.SPEAKER BSo you had to learn to relinquish control. Did you have to learn to relinquish a promise of safety?SPEAKER AThey promised me I would be safe, but it was very difficult for me to believe them. I called David multipletimes during the whole process. I was like, do you really trust these people? My caregivers werecompletely against it. My mother completely against it because it also has the appearance of someonebeing brainwashed, giving up control. It wasn't just control. I think there were other things they would beokay with. These are very peripheral things. They will not give you a schedule for the event. There is one,but you can't have it. You ask them when we're going to have a bathroom break, and they'll answer, whenit's time for a bathroom break.SPEAKER BWell, it occurs to me that they're safe and they're safe. So they may have been promising you that youwould be, like, physically safe, that you would leave intact and you'd be fine. But I'm also going to guessthat it did not feel psychologically safe on an instinct Amygdala sort of level.SPEAKER ANo, physically, I was 100% safe the entire time. Emotionally, I became a complete mental case.SPEAKER BSo did you learn that there were other ways to be safe, or did you have to kind of surrender to the factthat life isn't safe?SPEAKER AI had to surrender, and it took six months.SPEAKER BSo just in the interest of moving the story forward and just a little teaser to everybody that there'sobviously a lot more here, fast forward through those six months. You've completed it, you've learnedsome lessons. What was the final leg of that journey so far?SPEAKER ALike? Eventually, I overcame my issues. I started to trust not as something that was earned, but as adefault. My starting position with everyone I came in contact with was, I trust you.SPEAKER BReally?SPEAKER AYeah. That's where I am now.SPEAKER BAnd so to put a cap on it, you're in a new relationship. So tell me about that. After all of this trauma workand learning that safety isn't necessary at all times and that control certainly isn't necessary.SPEAKER AAt all times, so I've relinquished control over just about every area of my life. And no, not to my therapistor to people who do have my best interest at heart. I released control to my leaders in my company, andmy company basically doubled. And I work half the hours or less, so I work less and make more purely asthe result of trusting other people. It sounds crazy. That's literally all it was. At one point, there was even aconversation toward the end of the program, one of the coaches asked me, are you in the habit of hiringidiots? And I said, well, no, of course not. I said, Then why don't you trust them to run your business?SPEAKER BWhat about your relationship, your new one?SPEAKER AThe bridge to that was I gave up all of my safety in the US. I moved back to Mexico to build a new nursingteam again, giving up safety, trusting other people. Mexico is less safe than the US. Also, I met awonderful woman here. I asked her if I could say her name. She said, I can. It's Nicole. I'm not going tosay anything else, though. We fell in love, and I'm completely vulnerable with her. She's completelyvulnerable with me. It is the healthiest relationship I've ever had.SPEAKER BSo as a closing note, you are, I believe, now, 41. Happy birthday.SPEAKER AThank you.SPEAKER BAnd what are you going to do with your next 41 years now that you've learned this lesson, Mr. Impossible?SPEAKER AThey say that none of us can heal completely from trauma. That could be true, but I'm going to challengeit and find out. The other thing. The most courageous act I can think of is not to do what I used to do andto say, I can endure anything, but I'll just turn off. You can endure any amount of pain if you're numb. Now,I still have to put my hands on the flame. I still have to endure the pain. I still have to go through thingsother people can't imagine, and I'll try things that other people have never done before. What I'm doingnow? Moving to another country to build a nursing team to take care of me, to then travel all over theworld. Don't know of anyone who's ever done that before. So I'm doing all of those things, but I'm doing itwith my full self, with my emotions turned on, all the way on. All right, everybody.SPEAKER BSo that was the last episode in the Impossible Man podcast series. As I've mentioned, this is an overview.It was just meant to give you sort of a high level view of what there is in this story. And as we go deeperand deeper, as we're writing the book together, the story just gets more and more nuanced. This is one ofthose cases where truth is stranger than fiction. Truth is more compelling, let's say, than fiction. So nowthat the podcast is over, it is not the end of the journey. Remember, the whole point was that John and Iare writing this book together. Now, I don't know if it'll be called The Impossible Man or if we will call itsomething else. So just know that there will be progress updates over time. I have no idea how long it willtake. That depends a lot on John and what he wants to do with the book and the best way, probably to keep in touch and to keep tabs on this entire thing is to go ahead and subscribe to either John's list or to my website, Johnnybtruant.com, and that has the h in Johnny. And I will keep you up to date on this. If youwant to subscribe, remember, as always, that you can find John on Twitter at johnmarrow Jonmorrow, andyou can always contact him at [email protected] as well. And any email sent to that addresswill be forwarded to him. So I want to thank you so much for being here for this series. It's been very, veryinteresting to record and the reception, although it has been small, has been quite enthusiastic. And sothank you to all of you out there who have been following along. We will see you when we see you, anduntil then, thank thank you for listening to The Impossible Man. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnnybtruant.substack.com

LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherIn this next-to-final episode, Jon (and his intense issues with control) embarks on an intense new frontier: dating. It shouldn’t surprise you that Jon’s approach to dating follows the exact same “impossibility principles” as everything else in his life … with similarly impressive results. But this episode also turns a dark corner: Just as Jon’s emotional redemption hits a critical point, an unspeakable event sends him into the most broken, surrendering depths he’s ever faced. This is the next-to-final episode of the Impossible Man podcast. Be sure to subscribe below so you don’t miss future updates on the project!TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS:NOTE: The transcript below was generated by AI and has not been edited. Accordingly, some things below are a little weird … but you’re smart, so I’m confident you can figure it out. SPEAKER AAmong the severely disabled, there's this very real sense that we are unlovable, that no one would ever date us, that we are excluded from that race. It occurred to me that could be true. But is just letting thatmassive assumption go unchallenged really the most courageous thing to do?SPEAKER BWelcome to The Impossible Man, the true story of how the inability to move allowed one person to tradehis humanity for ODS defying superpowers and how he clawed his way back. So welcome back to thepenultimate episode of The Impossible Man. We have just this and one more episode left to follow. Andas things turned out, it did end up being a second half of act two and then act three in the episode fourand five. Go figure. In this episode, John covers some really, really rough ground. If you remember, at theend of the last episode, john said that he got to a point where he controlled everything but still didn't feelsafe. In this episode, we're going to follow the aftermath that came from that. And then in the finalepisode to air next week, we're going to close the story and just know that there's so much more when wefinish writing the book and that this podcast series has been an overview of the highest level of the storyand there's so much more depth to it. So without further ado, let's continue with The Impossible Man. Allright, John, looks like we're in the home stretch here. I kind of like that there's some structure to the show.Now. We know that it's got two more episodes. We know what the next two episodes are going to cover,and it feels like a satisfying story. In brief. I mean, not fleshed out. That's why people need to get thebook. But does that feel about the same to you?SPEAKER AYeah, I think so. It's a good balance to give everyone a taste of what's coming. You get all the low pointsand some of the high points to come, too.SPEAKER BWe left kind of off on a cliffhanger in episode two, but there was one thing that just occurred to me almostspontaneously while I was listening back to episode three. I've known you for about a decade now, and Iguess I didn't realize until I heard it on the show. I don't hear you laugh a lot, like, you're a serious guy,even with we know each other reasonably well. So is that just my perception, or are you kind of a seriousdude and it takes a little bit to get you laughing?SPEAKER AI'm a pretty serious dude. I would say that over the past two years, since I went through therapy, I laughmore than I used to. With my nurses that are with me, I'm constantly joking, so they're laughing all daylong. My girlfriend, too, also do I do a really big laugh. It takes a lot of muscle in your diaphragm and Idon't have that. So even when I'm laughing so hard, tears are coming out of my eyes. Still not like a bigbooming laugh. It's pretty quiet.SPEAKER BIt made me think that this can't all be negative for you, that there's at least some stories in here that areamusing, and I hope it's cathartic.SPEAKER AIt is. One of the concepts from therapy is that if you ask a trauma specialist, will I be able to talk aboutthis without crying? The answer is when you've shed all the tears. So reliving something and experiencingthose emotions in some ways. One theory I heard, which is very interesting, is that trauma is just emotionthat you are resisting experiencing, and if you will experience it, all the trauma goes away.SPEAKER BWell, I feel like I've, I don't know, learned about that or experienced it or thought about it recently as wellin a different context because, knock on wood, I haven't personally had a lot of trauma for which I'm reallygrateful. But the idea that negative emotion hurts because you're resisting it to some degree, I mean,obviously there is a base level of stuff there, but it's the resistance. It's the I don't want to feel that. Thattends to dog a lot of people.SPEAKER AIt's normal to have, quote unquote negative emotions, but where you get into unhealthy territory is whenyou refuse to feel them. And that doesn't always mean verbalizing your emotions. The most emotionallyhealthy people I've seen, they feel the full range of emotions, but they fully experience and then releasethat emotion rapidly. So they're in a state of flow with their emotion, even if they're not speaking. Andthat's what I strive to do.SPEAKER BLet me ask you about something else that came out after we pressed stop on the recording last time, andyou said something like therapy or maybe you can recontextualize this for me, that therapy will help youget rid of 95% of trauma. And this is obviously a little hyperbolic. It's not an exact figure, but that the 5%that remains is kind of yours forever. And I posited the idea that maybe that's grit in the oyster. Maybethat's the 5% that you need that makes you stronger.SPEAKER AWhat do you think about that? I think it's very possible, and I've had multiple trauma specialists tell methat that some of it stays with you. Another metaphor I've heard is it's scar tissue that you can completelyheal the wound, but some scar tissue is going to remain, and that scar tissue actually makes that part ofyour body stronger than it was before. So I think there's some truth to that too.SPEAKER BTo give people an idea of what we have in mind for these final two episodes, I'm seeing everything in acts,and I actually told my wife yesterday, I couldn't have written a better character and a better story. Iwouldn't have made any different choices. Your life made all the right choices as far as a satisfying story.SPEAKER AYou're welcome.SPEAKER BYes, thank you. Makes my job a little easier. So the first episode was the overview. The second episodewas basically act one. Last episode was the first half of act Two, right up to the midpoint. And this onelooks like it's going to be the second half of act Two. And then the final episode will be act Three. So westopped when we said and it was kind of on a cliffhanger. You needed to be safe. That was your goal andyour strategy was to control everything. And I said, hey, can you give me a sneak peek of what's going tohappen going forward? I said, did you get to a point just yes or no? Did you get to a point where youlearned that you could be safe without controlling everybody? And I said it in such a way that I was justassuming a yes and you said no. You said, I basically got to the point where I controlled everything, but Istill wasn't safe. And so I'd like to begin with addressing that and we're going to talk largely about whereyou began to kind of see that that strategy either wasn't working or wasn't effective. I guess that's thesame thing to the point where at the end, I think you're going to have to drop it. Does that sound roughlycorrect?SPEAKER AWhen you're the CEO of the company and you're the founder and you're the 100% shareholder, which bythe way, 100% shareholder, major control sentum, I control everything in my business. I am king. And so Igot to a level there where I had a successful business where I was in complete control. And then I startedto feel the sense of that it wasn't enough. One of my core values has always been to live courageously.And I realized that I was living that value in the world of business. To some extent, I would argue I wasn'tas far along as I thought I was, but I wasn't living that value in other parts of my life, like dating. I was avirgin until I was 31 years old. And part of the reason why is among the severely disabled community,there's this very strong and very real sense that we are unlovable, that no one would ever date us, that weare excluded from that race. And my implicit answer was that's true because anytime I was around girls,they never communicated any sort of attraction my entire life. So my assumption was it was impossiblefor them to be attracted to me. It occurred to me that could be true. But is just letting that massiveassumption go unchallenged really the most courageous thing to do? And the answer was no. So myoriginal intent when I started dating was to actually test that assumption. And my hypothesis is that it wastrue and that I would prove it. And then I would never have to worry about it again.SPEAKER BSo your stepping into dating had less to do with wanting that particular adventure and more about thisfeeling that if you didn't, you weren't living according to your core value, one of your core values, whichwas to live courageously, is that correct?SPEAKER AYes.SPEAKER BUsually someone who is charging forward, wanting to control everybody, living sort of a domineering lifein order to feel safe, usually that strategy comes with a certain degree of obliviousness. You need to feelbulletproof, you need to feel that you can kind of do no wrong, that you are smarter than everyone else,all that stuff. And realizing that you weren't living courageously feels like it flies in the face of that becauseit took an awareness that you weren't living courageously, which a lot of people in your position with thatattitude wouldn't have seen. But then courage itself, like admitting to a lack of courage feels like a realassault to I mean, I would assume that everything else you felt you were doing was courageous. So whatwas that journey like?SPEAKER AWhere it came from is being around lots of successful entrepreneurs in Austin, Texas and realizing howincredibly self aware they were. It's one of the hallmarks of a great entrepreneur is they know themselves,for better and worse, really well and they're not oblivious to their flaws. And being around that kind ofrubbed off on me and I started being a lot more introspective at first in my business and then later thatkind of spread to my entire life. Because one of the core ideas of entrepreneurship is not only to build asuccessful business, but build a business that serves your life goals, whatever those goals are. And whatthat means is if your life goal is to be home every day at 05:00 to spend time with your family, thenrunning 100 million dollar company is probably not in the cart. On the other hand, maybe running a $1million but highly profitable company is in the cart. So being aware of yourself and who you are and whatyou want and there are really no wrong answers, but it comes through self awareness. And without thatself awareness you cannot be a successful entrepreneur. You will actually drive yourself insane.SPEAKER BDo you think that this was attempting to fill that toolbox even further than what we were talking aboutbefore? So you mentioned that when you watched all the movies you weren't trying to learn to relate topeople for its own sake because you were looking for connections. It was more that if you understoodpeople better, you would be able to control them better. Was this the same sort of thing that the end goalwas control and hence safety?SPEAKER AThere was starting to be a break in that I would say it was just the opening fissures. Yes, there was a lot ofthat. But there was also a sense of once I got around other super successful entrepreneurs, and we'retalking billionaires. My sense was they have something that I don't, and I want it. And that somethingwasn't money. It was actually a sense of being a sense of peace, a sense of being the best version ofthemselves. And that desire to have that, that's kind of what sparked this journey.SPEAKER BSo I'm dying to get into the story of the dating, but I want to kind of sniff around the edges of it first assort of an epiphenomenon of this change. So is there a cause and effect here? You mentioned in the lastor maybe it was in the first episode, you said that the realizations that maybe you needed a change instrategy began around the age of 31, when you started dating. Now you've just repeated 31. And you saidthat a lot of this was caused by being around other entrepreneurs and realizing that they were self aware.And so you were looking to get what they had that made them successful, in which case included selfawareness. So was this cause and effect that the entrepreneurs were? First you moved to Austin, wereexposed to more people, and then this realization came, you know what? I should face that big datingboondoggle that I have. Or was it the same time but unrelated, or was it the other way around?SPEAKER ANo, it was in direct order. I moved to Austin, I was around them. I started to get more introspective andmore self aware around my business, and then that self awareness started to spread to my entire life.SPEAKER BWhat caused the change to Austin? Was that something that coincidentally gave you this realization, orwas this part of a larger thing?SPEAKER ABefore I moved to Austin, I was living all around southern Florida, around Miami, for about two and a halfyears. And I was very, very lonely. Achingly, unbearably lonely. And it eventually occurred to me it wasbecause there were no entrepreneurs there at the time.SPEAKER BDid you have entrepreneurs around you before that, for you to have that realization before that?SPEAKER AWhen I lived in Sacramento, which is near San Francisco, there were a lot of entrepreneurs there, and Ireally enjoyed that. I'd also started to do it to get in conferences and made a lot of friends in person. Andall of that gave me a sense of I feel less alone when I'm with these people. So I made a list of all of myfavorite entrepreneurs and their zip codes, and because I'm a nerd, put all of this in a spreadsheet. Andthen I plotted it on Google Maps and Austin had the most dots. So I called my assistant and I said, I'mmoving to Austin.SPEAKER BWas there any awareness that some internal stuff might have been exacerbating, that loneliness, or did itfeel purely geographical?SPEAKER AIt felt purely geographical. It wasn't, but that's what I thought at the time.SPEAKER BI'm guessing it went Sacramento, Mexico, Florida, austin. Is that correct?SPEAKER AI lived most of my life in North Carolina. Then in 2010, I moved to Montoland, Mexico. And then for thenext three and a half years, I went back and forth between there and Sacramento. I did live in San Diegofor a couple of months, but I was kind of in this phase of flitting around and trying all kinds of places tosee where I liked living. And the idea was, you have all these places people dream of living san Diego, SanFrancisco, Miami. I'm going to go live in all those places and see what I like. And so I lived on the beachfor, I don't know, five years.SPEAKER BI'm guessing that what you did in terms of not just moving but moving a lot, and you moved back andforth between Mazatlan and Sacramento. I'm guessing that's atypical for somebody with SMA or any othersevere handicap. Did that occur to you?SPEAKER AYeah, I've never heard of it before.SPEAKER BDid people question that or even people close to you in terms of the difficulty and stress on you?SPEAKER APeople close to me were very supportive. I have a very OD relationship with the rest of severely disabledadults. On the one hand, I have immense empathy for what they're going through. On the other hand, Ihave no sympathy whatsoever, even less than other people. And in general, my life is evidence that if theyare holding themselves back because they're making certain excuses, my life is evidence that most ofwhat they believe is bullshit. And so I make other disabled people intensely uncomfortable.SPEAKER BHow is it with people who aren't disabled? Because when I hear somebody say, I can't do X, honestly, youspring to mind a lot.SPEAKER AI mean, everyone has excuses, by the way, including me. I tend to break through them more often thanyour average person, but everyone makes excuses. Every person has limiting beliefs, and I tend to have avery keen sense for when either my myself or when someone else is playing the victim. And I tend to callpeople out. I've even said to members of my team before, you are not a victim, don't act like one. Andthat's a startling thing for people to hear. On the other hand, I've had people who I have very hardconversations with, which is typically some version of you are playing the victim, you need to stop. AndI'm telling you right now, this is going to ruin your life if you continue. That is a conversation where peopleget angry, where they cry. I've had those conversations on sales calls. But on the other hand, I've hadhundreds of people come back to me and said, Change my life. No one had ever told me that before.SPEAKER BSpeaking of limiting beliefs, let's circle back to the mindset of beginning dating. So you said that you did itbecause it occurred to you that this was an unaddressed belief and that you were failing to becourageous if you didn't face it, but that you expected it to turn out to be true. So can you delve a little bitdeeper into the beginning of that journey?SPEAKER AI applied the same strategy that worked for me on everything else. It was a game of incredible, intensevolume, not only of study, but also dating. So I started by buying every book and every course on dating. Imean, we're talking 30 plus books and I don't know, 50 grand in courses. And I went through it just like Ido everything else. It was just sort of the worst thing in the world is ignorance. Let me learn everything Ican. And I learned a lot. But I still believed that I would be out of luck because even in the datingcommunity, there is no one who has great relationships with women who is disabled. The closest wasSean what was his last name?SPEAKER BHis name was Sean Stevenson.SPEAKER AYes. Sean recently passed away. I got to meet him before he died. He was inspiring to me. He wasmarried. He was a doctorate level psychologist, and he was like 2ft tall. Amazing person. But there reallywasn't anyone who, in my mind was successful with women. So my initial thought was, I'm right, but let'sfind out for sure. So I started inviting every girl I came across, whether I was attracted to her or not, to adate. I had a dating coach, and his assignment was, you asked for six phone numbers a day. I asked forlike 30. My phone was eventually full of literally over 500 numbers, and I would take them to a coffeedate. And some days I would literally go on dates for five or 6 hours. I would have them back to back towhere one girl would leave and another way come in.SPEAKER BSo let's go ahead and address a potential elephant in the room. And that's that. You are approachingdating in a very mechanistic way. Most people who date, no matter what their situation or condition is, donot. Maybe people don't even know that a dating coach that that's a thing. And most people certainlyhaven't hired them. And there is something, although it would be really hard to put a finger on why, butthere is something that tends to hit people the wrong way. Once you subject something that peopleconsider to be sort of a matter of the heart or something that is just supposed to be done by pixies andfairies, when you subject that to anything that could be clocked on a spreadsheet, anything that is aprocedure, anything that is bulk action, what's your response to that?SPEAKER AI have two responses. Number one, I was approaching it again from the same sense of control. I want tocontrol the outcome. I want to be as attractive as I possibly can. I wasn't trying to fake anything. That'sone thing I always believe was wrong. I never presented myself as anything but who I was. I never lied toanyone ever. It's my number one rule, is complete and total honesty. The second thing is I believe a lot ofpeople are naive, that dating is something that happens naturally. Everything we do in the dating processis an attempt to present our best self, even down to what clothes we choose or what words we say. Andso to believe that presenting your best self is not a skill that gets better with practice is naive. So Iactually think that more men and women should be a lot more open about the idea of gaining experienceand practice and skill with their love life. And I think we would have better relationships, not from the lensof let me manipulate people into liking me, from the lens of let me present the best version of myself thatI possibly can.SPEAKER BTake me through how that went because I have so many questions and I'm sure that people are going topeople listening are going to have so many questions because what happens with you in dating is going tobe different from what is happening to a lot of people who are listening. But it's also a very unique set ofsituations. It's a very unique set of circumstances because you aren't doing a lot of the things that a lot ofpeople do when they date. So what was the response of the people that you were having these dateswith? What was your success rate like? What did people say? How did you feel? All that stuff.SPEAKER AI tracked it on the spreadsheet and it was their response to me, my response to them. Initially, it wasextremely awkward. The very first girl that I went on the date with, I ended up three years later finding heragain on dating apps. And we went on another date and she became my girlfriend for two years. But thefirst date between us, very awkward. And it was just because I was nervous. I didn't know what to say. Ididn't know how to present myself. And she was the same way. It was the first date she had ever been ontoo. So we connected a little bit over that, but otherwise neither one of us knew how to lead. And so itjust kind of never went anywhere. Eventually I got to where my response was almost always, let's say 90%of the time, I'd love to see you again. And it was genuine because I would ask like, when? And they wouldgive me a day and the time. The reason why that was true is because, number one, I presented myselfwith complete honesty and number two, I was intensely curious about them. And I approached it with thespirit of curiosity and the spirit of I want to understand what you're looking for, how you think about thispeople love talking about that. So I would have these two hour conversations with complete strangers incoffee shops. By the end of the conversation, they would have told me the most intimate details of theirlove life and I learned a lot really fast.SPEAKER BHow are you meeting them? It's a two part question when you say that you were asking for phonenumbers and stuff. I'm trying to imagine if you were in like a mingling sort of environment where you wereface to face to begin with or whether these were on dating apps. And then the second part of thequestion is, were they surprised when they met you or did they know that they were going to meetsomebody who can't move?SPEAKER AIt was both in person and online. In person. It was literally any woman without a wedding ring initially,because my goal was.SPEAKER BJust to learn you would start a little bit of small talk and then ask if you could have their phone number.SPEAKER AIn the beginning, I sucked at this. I got coaching on this, the very best beginner opener. And all the guysout there, listen up. Hello. My name is John. I find you very attractive and I just couldn't stop myself fromcoming over and saying, would you like to grab a cup of coffee sometime? That's it.SPEAKER BMy 2023 radar says that that might not always be well received. You didn't have any trouble with thatline?SPEAKER AI'm not saying it's the best line, but it's the best beginner line. I would get probably about 50 50. And bythe way, when a girl doesn't want to give you her number, she says, oh, I have a boyfriend, even when shedoesn't. So you typically don't get harsh rejections. At least I didn't. My goal in the beginning was just todo it. I mean, at the time, 50% was pretty good. Eventually it got up to nearly 100% as I got really, reallygood at it. And that's less about what you say and more about the energy that she feels from you.SPEAKER BWell, I could delve into the nuances of dating for hours and hours and we will off the podcast, we will, butwe need to keep moving on or this is going to be a six hour episode. So you ended up in was this thesame relationship with the woman that we're going to call Hummingbird to protect her privacy?SPEAKER ANo, she was my second girlfriend. My first girlfriend was a stewardess. I won't say which airline. And bythe way, for anyone listening, I'm fully comfortable sharing my story, but I don't feel like it's fair to identifythe woman I dated. Feels like that would be uncool. So I dated her. She was my first girlfriend and shetold me straight up I was 31, she was 30. She was gorgeous, half black, half Japanese, very sweet. That'swhere I lost my fragility. She was an amazing first girlfriend. Exactly what I needed. And about, I don'tknow, six months into it, it became clear to me, without going into a lot of detail, that she was in love. Andshe started dropping hints about marriage, which was a shock to me. I never thought that would happen.And that proved my hypothesis that I wasn't unlovable. She really did truly, truly love me. And I finally toldher one day I didn't feel the same way. And I couldn't continue because I felt guilty knowing she felt oneway. And I felt she was a really, really good friend. She was my girlfriend, but I wasn't in love.SPEAKER BAnd so then hummingbird came after this.SPEAKER AYeah, that was my nickname for her. We used to joke that she was a hummingbird and she ran intowindows. So I always told her, like, when she left, said bye. It was Bye. Watch out for windows. She calledme a tortoise because I'm kind of slow and I've got a really thick shell, and I'm also very wise.SPEAKER BSo what was that relationship like? How did it differ?SPEAKER AShe was much younger than me. She was 26. I was, at that time, 32, 32, 33. She was brilliant. She was adoctor. She knew everything about my condition. She was fascinated by me as a biological specimen,mental specimen, everything. And we dated non exclusively for a few months. She was seeing a fewpeople, I was seeing a few people. And we eventually, after a few months, decided to go exclusive, felldeeply, deeply in love, and even started talking about getting married.SPEAKER BHow was your arc progressing during this stage where previously you had learned something aboutemotion, but you'd learned it in a utilitarian fashion. So was it acquiring a more personal, more intimate,more other people focused sort of event to it?SPEAKER AIt was learning how to become a really great boyfriend in all the possible senses, in an authentic, honestway. So it was still a little bit about controlling. It was still about, if I'm a really, really good boyfriend, you'llnever leave me, which isn't true, by the way.SPEAKER BThat was your mentality, was that was why you were putting in that effort? Correct. For control.SPEAKER AAnd I had never been in love before, and I didn't just fall in love. I was Keto heels. Like, I would have diedfor this woman. She was the first thing I thought about in the morning. She was the last thing I thoughtabout before I went to sleep.SPEAKER BSo romance goes, or love goes hand in hand with a certain amount of surrender and vulnerability. Youcan't fully experience those things unless you open up and are vulnerable, and meanwhile, you're trying tobe safe, which requires, at least at this point, control. So was there some internal struggle going there?Because you had to kind of lose yourself, and that's the opposite of what you normally do?SPEAKER AYeah, there was a huge amount of. Struggle. I broke up with her three times during the process of datingher, and it was always through the lens of, I'm not on board with what you're doing if this is what you wantto do. Like, for example, she used to go to festivals around Austin and get really high from marijuana.We're not talking a little bit. We're talking, like, smoking for two days straight. And I just wasn't into that.And I said that that's what you're into. It's cool, but I'm not your guy. I'm never going with you to thosethings. And she stopped going to festivals. She was a very, very independent woman, and it was aprocess of me learning to be vulnerable and also me becoming the dominant partner in that relationshipthat was in control, and I expected her to submit, and that was not an easy thing to do for her.SPEAKER BSo looking back, do you think that it may be more mature or further down the path? Way to look at itwould have been, you do your thing and I'll do my thing because you don't need to be in control, or doesit still feel like that would have been a point of contention?SPEAKER AThat's the way I presented it, but that's not what I was feeling. What I was feeling was, I'm going to tell youthis, and then you're going to stop.SPEAKER BAnd she wasn't into that. She didn't want to be controlled. And so that led to the breakups.SPEAKER AYeah, but then she would change her mind and come back to me and say, I absolutely love you. If this isthat big of a deal for you, then do you think.SPEAKER BThat that was indeed the real reason, from your perspective, or do you think part of it was what I wassaying before, where you had to make yourself vulnerable?SPEAKER AThere were some things it took me a long time to tell her. It took me almost a year to tell her she was mysecond girlfriend. I was always really vague about how many girls I dated. She was much moreexperienced. Even that the age of 26. The the other things physical vulnerability, like, about my disease isnot really hard for me. Vulnerability about my emotions, that was hard for me. Telling her that I loved herfor the first time was a very difficult for me to do.SPEAKER BI know that at some point I asked you about you were controlling people so that you could feel safe.Imagining you got to a certain point where you realized you could feel safe without controlling people, andyou said, no, that the real lesson was that you had to learn that you would never be entirely safe and hadto be okay with it. Was there any sort of version of that in this where you kind of had to surrender to somedegree or could have surrendered and didn't? To the idea that substitute safe for not knowing what theother person's going to do. And you began to think along those lines?SPEAKER AYeah, I told her I loved her before she told me she loved me, even though I thought I was pretty sure sheloved me. And I did it through the lens of wanting to live courageously, but I became increasinglyemotional, increasingly volatile, not in a dangerous way, but in a sort of wasn't the normal, controlled Johnthat I used to be because I was no longer completely in charge of my life or my emotions. She had a biginfluence on that, and that loss of control was terrifying.SPEAKER BAnd then I'm guessing that everything was happily ever after. From that point, you'd learned your lesson,and life has been entirely on 100% rosy. Is that correct?SPEAKER ANo. When we started talking about getting married, we kind of agreed that we would get married. Therewere no rings. We agreed that she was going to move in with me. And she went to tell her best friend at abar in downtown Austin. And she told her friend they were happy. She came outside and she was walkingback to her car, which was about a block away, and two guys grabbed her and pulled her into an alleywayand just brutally, brutally raped her.SPEAKER BAnd what did that do to I mean, obviously it devastated her. What was the aftermath there for yourrelationship?SPEAKER AShe didn't call the cops. I think she had some brain damage from being beaten. She fought like a tiger,but against two ruined men, it didn't matter. And she went and got back in her car and drove home to seeme. She woke me up, touched my arm, and I woke up and I looked at her and her face was just her faceand her hair were just full of blood because I guess they had beaten crooked against the pavement. It'samazing she could even drive home. She said something terrible happened. Asked her if she wanted tocall the cops. She said no. She was afraid it would ruin her career. Because there's a stigma that onceyou've been raped, that you were damaged somehow. It's still a very male dominated field. Health care.We made it through one day, terrible day. She got cleaned up. We went to bed. We went to sleep, and Iwoke up with her standing over me again with the phone in her hand calling 911. And she says, there arebombs strapped to the house. Send the bomb squad.SPEAKER BAnd I assume the bomb squad came.SPEAKER AYeah.SPEAKER BDid she end up in some sort of treatment? I mean, it sounds like it broke her. I know that you're not withher and that this ended. So was that it? Was that the end right there?SPEAKER ANo. She had a complete what they call a psychotic break. Psychotic in the medical sense, not in the yourpsychotic sense that a lot of people use it. Psychosis is where you're living in a different reality thaneveryone else. She was seeing things, experiencing things that I was not. No one else was. I don't know.Doctors don't know if it was due to the rape, if it was due to brain injury, if it was some sort of hiddenschizophrenia that was buried in her that got triggered. But she spent the next six months in a privatemental hospital and became a different person. She became convinced that I was hunting down peopleshe loved and murdering them. And then when those people then presented themselves to her and said,I'm still alive, she would say, It's not you. You're a copy. So I stayed with her through all of this and wenton for about six months after that. So about a year from the incident to the end of the relationship, sheeventually started to recover. She eventually started to realize more about what was real and what wasn't.She was unable to work. She got intense anxiety around any man, and I was completely powerless tohelp her. There was nothing I could do. And that powerlessness. And to see someone I loved with all ofmy heart breaking and falling to pieces and being able to do nothing about it, that broke me.SPEAKER BSo that concludes the next to last episode of The Impossible Man. You know the score by now. If youwant to get in touch, John is at. Johnmarrow Jonmorrowi am not on any social media, but you can find meon my [email protected], J-O-H-N-N-Y-B-T-R-U-A-N-T. If you go ahead and sign up for mywebsite, you'll be kept in the loop and you can follow progress of the book and everything else. So thankyou for listening, and we will continue with the final episode of The Impossible Man. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnnybtruant.substack.com

LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherThank you for your kind words about the podcast so far! If you’re enjoying this series, please like and/or comment on this post so we’ll know about it. In this episode, we move Jon’s story out of the First Act and into the Second. Jon faces a choice, then embarks on a journey … but watch out, because like all heroes on a path to change, Jon brings a flawed strategy into the Second Act with him, and it puts him on the path to more big lows before the tide can possibly begin to rise. Wondering why I’m talking about Jon like he’s in a character in a book? Subscribe below to get a cheat sheet of the process I used to uncover Jon’s “character arc.”I also discuss a solidifying of the podcast format in this episode, so listen for that. We now know this will be a five-episode series giving the complete and hopefully-satisfying story … but told in sparse enough detail that you’ll still want to buy the book when we’re done with it. Y’know. Because that’s a thing, too.TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS:NOTE: The transcript below was generated by AI and has not been edited. Accordingly, some things below are a little weird … but you’re smart, so I’m confident you can figure it out. SPEAKER AI said, listen, I'm gonna give you a very important decision tonight. You have one of three options. Optionnumber one is you can kill me right now and there's nothing I can do to stop you. Option number two is Iwill sell everything I own and hire a hitman to kill you. Option number three is that you leave and no oneever sees you again.SPEAKER BClose. Welcome to The Impossible Man, the true story of how the inability to move allowed one person totrade his humanity for ODS defying superpowers and how he clawed his way back. Hey, everyone, andwelcome to the Impossible Man. This is our third episode. Big thanks to those of you who got in touchand said that you enjoyed the episode or the podcast as a whole and encouraged us to continue. We aregoing to continue, but we're going to continue in a very specific fashion. So what we've decided is thatthere's just so much that we're going to need to plunge here. There's bottomless stories. I mean, you guyshaven't heard what I have heard from John, but let's just say that there are a lot of rabbit holes, and all ofthe rabbit holes have rabbit holes. So John and I are going to be talking quite a bit. And our original ideato record absolutely everything is kind of falling apart for a few separate reasons, one of which is I didn'tsign on to make a podcast. I'm happy to do it. It was my idea. But there's a book to write here. And if Ispend all this time editing up the podcast, it's a significant expense of time. We don't come out this cleanand polished sounding that requires a lot of effort. And if I keep doing this, then I'm not going to get thatbook finished. And that's obviously not something that we're looking for. And the second reason is if Icould pull back the curtain a little bit, it's honestly commercial. We've been in touch with some peoplewho are advising us on the proposal and pitching this book. And they said, don't put everything out there.Put out a small portion and leave people wanting more. Well, that's exactly what we're going to do, but Ithink we're going to do it in a way that's really going to satisfy you. So I think that this episode that you'reabout to listen to contains both sides of that coin. Number one, you're going to see how many stories arehere. You're going to get a really compelling story from John. Let's just say it involves criminals. It involvescrazy behavior. It's something. But you're also going to be able to tell that there's a lot more to this, thatyou aren't hearing the full story. That's why you got to buy the book. A lot more fits in a book than fits on apodcast. And honestly, it's a better format for it anyway. So what we've decided to do is to complete anoverview of the entire story so that you have the entire story, but you're going to have it in kind of asummary fashion. We anticipate that taking two more episodes for a grand total of five episodes for thispodcast because it was never really meant to be a podcast, podcast ongoing. It was always meant to be alimited run to let you know a little bit about this amazing story and to honestly interest you in learningmore. So this will be episode three, and unless something kind of unusual happens that we aren'texpecting, we think that there will be two more episodes after this. Please keep letting us know if you'reenjoying this because honestly, this is kind of a market test for us. We want to know how interested youguys are and there is still time to get in questions. So if you have any questions, you can always just get intouch with either of us. So I'm not going to waste any more time here, especially not if that tease that youjust heard in the little Stinger opening the episode that story and many more are to come in this episode.And let's just get started. All right, John. So the response has been good to the first couple of episodes.There are a few things that I feel like we should get out of the way, though, that we haven't really done yet,that we've just sort of been assuming. Why are you, a prominent author like you are known as a writer?Why are you working with me on this project at all? Why are you working with any writer?SPEAKER AI've tried to write this story many times and it's always ended in disaster. Either I can't write it or it doesn'tfit together right. And I know it. And it eventually occurred to me after going through a lot of therapy, thatthe reason why is I just went through so much trauma during all of this that it just brings up too much painpieces of the story for me to be able to write about it. So in all likelihood, my story, which is the thingeveryone wants from me, is the thing that I am most unable to write. It's probably the only thing I'munable to write. And so that's why it eventually came to me that, well, what if you didn't have to write it,but you could still tell the story and that's where this idea came from.SPEAKER BDo you think any of that is distance from the story or I guess I would say lack of distance because you'retoo close to it. So, for instance, the major arc that we're pursuing, this idea of learning to be human, thatwas something that you didn't realize was there from an arc perspective. So do you think that it's just thatit's too emotionally close for all of these stories that you can't do the story justice, or is it more traumaticfor you, or both?SPEAKER AWhen I'm telling these stories, I'm actually experiencing what happened. Some of these stories are abouttimes almost died. Some of these stories are about violence. Some of these stories are about timeswhere I was incredibly depressed. And what happens when I tell those stories is I go back into that statein order to be able to give you as honest of a story as I possibly can. And that results in me losing touchwith the present. And it makes it very hard for me to reflect on how to tell the story appropriately or in themost compelling way.SPEAKER BSo you told me some stuff before we started recording. It was in this vein, it was cautions about howmuch this was going to affect you and so forth. And that makes me wonder how much you feel that you'vesort of processed all of this stuff just holistically. Because a lot of times you'll hear people who hadtraumatic experiences and they're over it or not over it to greater or lesser degrees. But the way that youtalk about this, it's almost like you're afraid for your sanity if you go back and revisit them. So do you feelthese memories really have that grip on you that you haven't moved through in the ways that you mighthave otherwise?SPEAKER AThe best definition I've heard of being healed from trauma is that you can relive the experience without ittaking control of you. I am, to that point, with all of these memories that it doesn't take control of me. Thatwasn't always the case. And taking control of you, by the way, can mean different things. Doesn'tnecessarily mean you just go into a trance. It means if there are certain stories you cannot tell, then thatstory is in control because you want to tell that and you can't. And for a long time, that's where I was withmany of these stories, is I wanted to tell them, and I just couldn't. And I've already told all of these storiesnow to therapists, to people I deeply trust, to close friends. And in the beginning, I was not in control. Ifyou start crying uncontrollably while you're telling a story and you don't want to cry uncontrollably, thenyou are not in control. And those kinds of things happen. They don't happen now. Now, I can't say that I'min complete control because the story still makes me feel a certain way, but it at least doesn't control mybehavior. And so from a therapeutic perspective, that's progress.SPEAKER BAnother question that I wanted to ask before we really resume this story is I realized it would probably bebeneficial to have kind of a quick list of the things that the accomplishments that you have. When I talkabout the things that you've done and the things that you've achieved, I say very successful multimilliondollar business. One of the best known writers on the web, super intelligent, all that sort of thing. But canyou give me a punch list of some of the things that you've done that would be impressive if.SPEAKER AAnybody had done them writing things that, as far as they could tell, literally hundreds of millions ofpeople have read? That would be one. I've made a lot of money, but I'm certainly not like, mega rich. Ifanything, I feel like I've underperformed as far as how much money I've made, even though I am amillionaire. So it's kind of weird to say.SPEAKER BThat underperformed relative to what expectations that you had.SPEAKER AWhen you look at my skill level compared to people with equal skill level at making money and buildingbusinesses, they are all richer than me. Now, I think there are reasons for that. They don't need a team ofnurses to get them out of bed in the morning. My condition, even though I've overcome it to some degree,is still an enormous distraction and time suck, so it still continues to cost me in the realm of business. Butdespite that, I've still managed to make enough money to do anything I.SPEAKER BWant to do, anything else that should go on that list.SPEAKER AThe things that I'm most proud of are none of those things. I'm most proud of finding the courage to goout and start dating. I'm most proud of falling in love. I'm most proud of for finding the courage to seektherapy. Lots of people brag about how much money they make or how popular they are, but at the endof the day, if you have all of that but you're a miserable human being, it's not really worth anything. On theother hand, it's where I reconnected. We even connected for the very first time with my own humanityand became a complete person and even had the courage to fight for that. That's what I'm most proud of.SPEAKER BAll right, so here's a real big, juicy question. Based on the stuff that we've been talking about with yourarc, that is the answer of an emotionally mature person who has thought through a lot of this. The idea ofbeing proud, of facing demons and going to therapy and all that stuff. What would younger John havesaid?SPEAKER AYounger John would have focused on variations of power, whether that be money, influence, or popularity,because younger John, all he cared about was accumulating enough power to not be scared anymore.SPEAKER BWhat were the achievements in the realm of various versions of power?SPEAKER AGetting to the point where I could reach anyone in the world and talk to them with enough effort wasn'talways easy. But I eventually got to the point where I can do that. If I want to make a post go viral, I can. IfI ask for favors and powerful people, almost everyone says yes. My good friend David Gonzalez definesinfluence as the number of people that you can ask for a loan for $100,000 and not tell them what it's for,and they immediately just say, yes. That number for me now would probably be pretty high.SPEAKER BWell, when we last left off, we covered early days. We covered the beginnings of what I keep calling theemotional callous, and that actually prompted some stuff in you that when you came back, you said, well,there's a lot more to that. There are some other dark stories that contributed to it. So can you just give mekind of a teaser of what other things started happening around this time that were just contributing to thatneed to bunker in and build a shell around yourself so that you couldn't be hurt?SPEAKER AProbably the biggest one was my mother and father got divorced, and my mother remarried a guy thatturned out to be the wrong guy. She made some mistakes in love that many of us do, wanting to see thebest in someone, and eventually found out his family was in the Mexican drug cartel. He was an alcoholic.He was violent, I'm guessing through his family, was nearly impossible to keep in jail. And I grew up withhim as a stepfather and not only survived, but I was in a position to where I felt like I had to protect mymother. And I was only 1516. I was a kid in a wheelchair who didn't have a violent bone in his body in theface of an extremely violent drug cartel. And, I mean, I ended up going to Mexico, met members of thecartel. I've sat face to face with a sakario Mexican assassin and had conversations, but still was basicallya kid. I learned that whenever you're around someone who's not afraid to use violence as a way to getwhat they want, that you have to become dangerous to defend yourself. I learned that when you're in thepresence of a killer, he never has to tell you that he's a killer. You can just tell. The most dangerous personis someone who can kill you and feel nothing. The only way to make someone like that afraid of you is forthem to know that you are also capable of killing them and feeling nothing. That is the only person theyrespect. And so, over the course of four years, that's who I became. I never killed anyone. But there weresome close calls to.SPEAKER BPoint out the obvious. You already said it. You're a kid in a wheelchair. How did you become dangerous?Because it doesn't seem like it was happening in the usual way.SPEAKER AThe most powerful people in the drug cartel are the guys at the top who order all of the sakarios, all oftheir kitmen to go out and do things, but they are never personally in a fight. So the most dangerousperson isn't actually someone who can do physical violence. It's someone who can order violence done toyou. Without remorse. And that's the way I became dangerous.SPEAKER BSo you made friends, you made connections.SPEAKER AMade friends. I made connections. Killers don't cost that much, especially if you're somewhere likeMexico. I mean, the way it ended was I came out to him one morning and I said, listen, I'm going to giveyou a very important decision to make. You have one of three options. Option number one is you can killme right now and there's nothing I can do to stop you. Option number two is I will sell everything I ownand hire a hitman to kill you. Option number three is that you leave and no one ever sees you again. Andit's one thing to have a 15 or 16 year old to say that to you, but what made it different was he could tellthat I was being 100% honest and that I would have him killed without remorse. And at that time Iabsolutely would have.SPEAKER BSo he took option C. He took.SPEAKER AOption C. It is an enormous credit to my stepfather that he still chose option C, that he still had enoughhumanity in him to do that because the easiest option to take would have been option A to kill me right atthat moment. So when I made that bet, I was betting, and I knew this, that he still had enough humanityleft in him to make that choice.SPEAKER BWell, I'm also going to assume that there wasn't an undeniable amount of pro for him to stay. Did he reallywant to stay? Was he ready to go? And it was then more of a matter of pride of not being caught out bysome young punk?SPEAKER AYeah, I think he didn't really want to stay. I think there was some pride. And also, I think at Cart he was acoward, so he was never allowed into the cartel because he was seen as too much of a hothead and justkind of an idiot. But also, I think he did love my mother. I think he did respect me and I think he did feelregret for things he had done and the way that he had affected us. And he just needed someone to tellhim, this is really it.SPEAKER BAnd I mean, it needed the decision made for him. Right, because he might have felt the need to waffle insome way if you hadn't made it clear.SPEAKER AYeah. And he was also familiar enough where if he hadn't believed me, he wouldn't have left. But hehundred percent believed that what I was telling him was true. His face actually turned white when I toldhim and he didn't say a word. He went and packed his stuff and he left and I've never seen it again.SPEAKER BAll right, well, then I circle back to where do you go from there? Because that in itself is its own fantasticstory. And now I'm imagining you kind of go back to normal life, and that just seems weird. Aftersomething like that, I went back.SPEAKER ATo a somewhat more normal life, but I was the same person. He had still turned me into someone whocould kill without remorse. I'm grateful I've never had to do that. But even if your life circumstanceschange, it's not something that goes away. And even now, it's still with me. If I were to ever becomeconvinced that the absolutely only option was to kill someone, there's absolutely no doubt in my mind Icould do it. And I say that knowing this is being recorded.SPEAKER BWell, so you're 16 with this attitude, so that's pretty dark. At age 16, you still had high school to finish, youstill had college to do, you still had a lot of normal world stuff to do. Did it just kind of bubble into thebackground?SPEAKER ASo I graduated like two or three months after this happened. I graduated a year early, and I was one ofthose kids who started school young, so I graduated when I was 16. What I learned from that experiencewas I had to be in charge or no one was safe. That was a subconscious thing, and I don't agree with thatlesson. I wasn't even aware until I started going through therapy that that was the lesson I took away fromit. And it basically been operating my life under. And so I would never let anyone ever be in charge of anysemblance of authority or leadership. I would immediately attack it.SPEAKER BCan you give me an example?SPEAKER AI got kicked out of church because I kept challenging the authority of the pastor, kept asking questionsthat I knew would be embarrassing, that he wouldn't know the answer to. I was doing it to deliberatelyundermine him in front of the congregation. Why? Because I couldn't let someone else be in charge. Itwas important to me at the time for everyone to know that I knew the Bible better than the pastor.SPEAKER BWe've joked a little bit modern day. It's kind of a half joke because it's definitely true, is that you do havean ego. You're unapologetic about thinking that you're pretty darn smart and that sort of thing. So where isthe overlap there? Because there is an egotistical aspect of I know better than everyone else. Ego isdifferent from this wound where you feel you need to control because it's coming out of a scarcity, andyou're going to be damaged if you aren't in control. Was there interplay there?SPEAKER AThere was. It was totally about control. It was totally about humiliating other authority figures. I made twoprofessors in computer science actually break down and cry in front of their classes. And the way that Idid it was literally by doing more advanced stuff than they could and then humiliating them in front oftheir classes. So we're not talking about the ego of saying, I know I'm smart, or even I know I'm smarterthan you. It's I'm smarter than you, and everyone is going to know it.SPEAKER BSo you keep it a little more to yourself these days.SPEAKER AI eventually, after going through therapy, learned that this was my pattern. Eventually I got to the pointwhere now I want people around who are smarter than me and better than me, and I want them to be incharge. I would say nowadays I don't have nearly as much ego as even when you met me, and it'simmensely freeing. Imagine being someone so afraid all the time that you have to be in control ofeveryone all the time. That's who I was. Now, as I got a little bit older and more mature, I got better atcontrolling myself and not rubbing it in people's faces, especially not in the public way. But I was still thatperson, and I would still find ways to undermine them that didn't reflect as badly on me as a person.SPEAKER BAnd it sounds like you were able to do it kind of like a ninja, too. You described some of those schoolthings as, well, your mom never knew, and teachers never knew. So not only were you manipulatingpeople, you were doing it in a way where you came out looking like roses.SPEAKER AI was still doing that until 38, 39 years old, and it was finally a therapist who saw my behavior, realizedwhat was happening, and directly challenged me.SPEAKER BAbout it back at age 16 or something. So this is around the time that you're doing the software companyas well. The story that you told that was around 16.SPEAKER AI think I was 17 when I started it because the sequence of events were I finished high school like, twoweeks later. I went into summer, summer school in college. I didn't even wait until the fall semester, and Idid two or three semesters, and then all of this was happening with teachers. I was immensely fed upwith school and authority, and a brilliant programmer invited me to launch a virtual reality company withhim, and I took him up on it.SPEAKER BIs that the guy who wore the sword on his belt?SPEAKER AYes, that was Kip, now known as Kenzie, because Kenzie is trans. But Kip at the time was the mostbrilliant programmer and one of the most brilliant people ever that I've ever met. We're talking 100 and8190 IQ. Someone just off the charts smart. Kip liked me because I was smart enough to keep up withhim, and he was completely incapable of socially acceptable behavior.SPEAKER BWell, the things that I know about Kip, because you've told this story before, is that at the time, he onlyate Hot Pockets. He only drank Mountain Dew and used a chair that had to be specially made because itwas like a kneeling chair or something.SPEAKER AYeah. Couldn't have any back on it. Kip also had extreme Add and found the drugs to be intolerable. Onetime we had a meeting with a banker and he ran out of a room chasing a bug. Only after he killed the bugto realize what he'd done and to come back in the meeting embarrassed. Kip was a Goth and used todelight in causing mischief. So he lived right next to a funeral parlor, and his father in law made an aircannon that could shoot a balloon a mile into the air without popping it. But Kip had this air cannon andwould fill it with skittles and shoot them over the funeral parlor. While they were having funerals outside,kip would fill it with rubber chickens and shoot them over the funerals. He would trim his hedges with hissamurai sword. It was a real samurai sword. So, brilliant programmer. He did the job of at least 50 people,50 programmers, all by himself. He was the programming department, and he was pretty much incapableof working with almost all other programmers. He had one friend who he could work with named Cyclone.No idea what his real name was. Quite an OD bunch that I fell into, but I actually felt at home.SPEAKER BThis was your company. This was the company that you formed, and these people worked for you or withyou.SPEAKER AAnd we made virtual reality software for the Defense Department for soldiers to learn various languages,mostly Middle Eastern languages. At the time. It was extremely cutting edge. Nowadays, it's a jokecompared to the stuff that's out there. But it was my first company. My father was the biggest investor. Hefunded everything until he couldn't anymore. And I had no idea what I was doing, but I didn't know that atthe time. I figured I was really smart. Tip was really smart. Of course we were going to be a success. Weoperated for, I don't know, a year and a half. And my dad had a business partner rob him of several milliondollars. Right when this was happening, he couldn't give us the money he had promised. We had to shutthe company down. Once people found out that we basically only had a runaway of like, three or fourmonths, they all quit. It sounds obvious, like, why people would do that, but John at the time wasimmensely shocked and betrayed.SPEAKER BI think we decided this was one of the biggest, the first really big landmarks that made you kind of perkup and say, maybe the way that I'm relating to people is not the most productive. Is that a fair way to saythat?SPEAKER AYeah. Up until that point in my life, every challenge I had faced, I had overcome every single one. This wasliterally the first one where I gave it everything I had and it wasn't enough.SPEAKER BSo what did you blame for that? Did you blame the other people? I'm I'm guessing you weren't blamingyourself. And what I'm looking for is the leverage point at which you said, maybe I need some changes. Ineed to make for probably two to three months.SPEAKER AI blamed other people for not being committed, for stabbing me in the back. I blamed Kip. I blamed allmy employees. I blamed my father.SPEAKER BYou blamed him because he had his failings and didn't have the money or because he'd done somethingelse?SPEAKER AYeah, because he didn't have the money, and he'd promised it to me. I felt like, I'm giving it everything Ihave, and I'm the only one. No one else is trying this art. This went on for a month or two, but eventuallyeveryone left and just kind of left me by myself. I didn't really have anyone to be mad at. And I wasinsightful enough to realize, put yourself in the position of someone who has to be in charge, or no one issafe. Someone who loses control of everyone around them. My learning at the time was basically, I'm notgood enough at manipulating people. I don't know if I would have put it in those words at the time, but itwas, I'm not connecting with them on an emotional level. I'm not a leader they respect. I don't haveinfluence. I don't have power. And I need to fix that or no one will follow me, and that won't be in control.SPEAKER BTony Robbins has this idea of a primary question, and it's like if the primary question is answerednegatively, if it's violated, that's like, the worst thing that can happen to somebody. So it sounds to me likeat this time, your primary question was, am I in control? Am I safe? And it sounds like you hit a placewhere the answer was, no, I am not in control, therefore, I am not safe. It sounds to me no wonder youwould have a downward spiral.SPEAKER AAnd I went through a dark period for three or four months, got pretty depressed, eventually even realizedstarted to learn about depression and realized I fiddled the symptoms for being depressed. The way Ilifted myself out of it was I decided, I'm going to learn about people. I'm going to learn about emotions.And even saying that out loud makes me laugh a little bit, because it's like, going to learn about emotions.SPEAKER BHow did you connect the dots between your lack of understanding of people? Was the reason becauseyou went to it from, they abandoned me. They gave up, and I didn't give up. So how did you get to thepoint where you were developing enough empathy to say, maybe they might have had some other depthto them that I couldn't see? Because I don't have empathy, therefore I need to develop it.SPEAKER AI don't know if I would call it empathy. Maybe it was very, very low level empathy. But my thinking was, if Ihad enough influence over them, they would have stayed with me even when they weren't being. Paid.SPEAKER BSo you were looking for a manipulation tool. You were looking for leverage.SPEAKER AYes.SPEAKER BOkay. And how did you get it?SPEAKER AWatching movies was originally how it started. I decided I was going to study people, basically, because Ididn't, at the time, have many emotions. I didn't understand anything about my own emotions. I wascompletely closed off. I'd just been with the stepfather that trained me how to be able to kill someoneand not feel anything. I signed up for a Blockbuster membership. They had this thing at the time that waslike $20 a month, and you could rent as many movies as you wanted, but two at a time. So you could renttwo, you'd have to bring them back, and you could have two more. And so I literally brought back my twomovies every day. I'd watch two movies a day, every single day. And my intent was to understandemotion. My intent was to understand people.SPEAKER BWhat's interesting to me is that it's this exact same approach that you took to understanding pneumoniaand lung anatomy is that you said, give I'm just going to do a shit ton of practice and learning, and I'mgoing to I mean, it's bulk you're talking. I think when you told me this before, you said it was 300 moviesthat summer. Just sheer force of will.SPEAKER AYeah, 300 movies. They told me it was a record. No one had ever rented that many movies in a year.SPEAKER BWere you systematic about it? Did you take notes?SPEAKER AI didn't take notes, but I would set aside certain movies to watch over and over again.SPEAKER BLike what?SPEAKER AFight Club. Fight club fascinated me. Seabiscuit fascinated the fact that everyone would believe inSeabiscuit after he was this lame horse. Absolutely fascinated.SPEAKER BWell, now, hang on a second, because I didn't know this element. So Fight Club is all about manipulation.Fight Club is very cult like, and the book is even more so. Seabiscuit, you just said that you werefascinated because nobody would believe in this horse, and you wanted to know how if I may take someliberties, the horse got people to believe in him. I mean, obviously it was trainers and stuff. So this is verydirected and practical. Were most of your investigations targeted at how to get people to believe? I mean,it almost sounds like you were trying to develop a cult.SPEAKER AYeah, I didn't realize it at the time, but I wanted to be able to control people, not for any evil purpose. Ididn't wish anyone harm. I just didn't want to be scared. I wanted to feel safe.SPEAKER BWell, the flip side of that is understanding psychology. If you don't understand how people think and whatmade them leave, that must be the ultimate out of control, because you can't prevent something youdon't understand.SPEAKER AYeah. And the fact that it was a surprise that they left and it was a surprise, I realized that there must besomething I don't understand. It can't be a surprise if you truly understand it. So I went to work trying tounderstand people.SPEAKER BSo did your investigations, did you kind of like biosmosis imbibe anything that wasn't strictly that goal thatyou found yourself developing empathy or emotions that you didn't expect?SPEAKER AThat was the unintended consequences of what started happening, is I started watching movies thatdidn't make me feel things and started to pay attention to those feelings and even journal about what Iwas feeling. I wasn't doing it as any sort of therapy. I was doing it in sense of curiosity. So, yeah, I wantedto understand myself better. And I became familiar with the concept that we can go through life and notknow who we are. And so I set about trying to understand who I was.SPEAKER BWhat's interesting to me about this is that you're starting with a cold emotionless, by your definition, sortof approach to this, that's almost it's facile you're looking to get a tool, but it sounds like you also had thisgreat degree of introspection, which does not normally go with that. Normally somebody who's looking forcontrol. There's an infallibility that is almost like armor, but it also sounds like you were aware of ashortcoming, which feels like it maybe contradicts that because you were aware that you were missingsomething and you were willing to see it.SPEAKER AYeah, I was. And I think I got that from trying to understand pneumonia, trying to understand differentdifficult problems. The worst thing that can happen when you're trying to survive any sort of medical issueis something no one expects. That's the absolute worst thing that can happen. So my theory wasignorance is the worst thing there is. It puts you in more danger than anything. And so my desire not to beignorant was much greater than my desire not to be wrong.SPEAKER BWhere did you get this bulk action thing that you do? Because this is skipping ahead, but in addition toreading all the FDA things and being super aware of lung anatomy for pneumonia, in addition to binginglike nobody's business on movies in order to understand emotion, there's a story. When you startedworking with copy blogger, which is a very large copywriting blog and writing blog that you wrote, howmany headlines was it in the course of a year?SPEAKER A36,000.SPEAKER BAnd that's a bulk action thing too. And I know there are other things. I know that your approach to kind oflearning dating was similar. And so where did that come from, that idea of, I'm just going to just force feedall this data into the machine? It almost sounds like a programmer's mentality, or AI mentality for thatmatter.SPEAKER AI think very much like a programmer does. I don't think it was anything more than logic. No one taught itto me. I didn't see it anywhere that I recall. But, I mean, imagine a doctor tells you you're dying and here'ssome books, that the answer could be somewhere in these books. Well, the logical thing to do is to readall the books, every page.SPEAKER BAs fast as you can, but multiple times, right? Because you said you read the Bible.SPEAKER ALike 100 times, 20 something times. Yeah, but it's still way more than most people. It's more than mostpastors. But I definitely picked it up just learning to survive. And for me, it was just logical. If the answer issomewhere here, and if ignorance is the worst thing there is, then of course I'm going to dedicate myselfto becoming an absolute expert on this.SPEAKER BAn expert means more information.SPEAKER AMore information. And so during this process of watching movies, I also started to I became introduced tothe idea of psychology and influence and the work of Robert Chaldini and the whole concept of sales andmarketing. And again, being someone who wanted to control the world, I was absolutely fascinated andread every book I could find. And at the time, I was so broke, I went through all the books in the locallibraries. And then I went to Barnes and Noble and I read entire aisles of Barnes and Noble sitting in theaisle, and they never kicked me out. They knew what I was doing, but they never kicked me out. Thankyou, Barnes and Noble employees. I appreciate that. But yeah, I just kept reading and reading and readingand reading and reading, and eventually started to use that. For someone with a learned for introspection.SPEAKER BMaybe a good way to close out this episode is so, again, I'm thinking like a fiction writer. And so I havewhat is probably a reasonably hard question, but let's see if what you think of it. And that is so we're intothe first act here because you have realized that there's an adventure to go on. In this case, an internalone, where you had to well, first of all, literally, you had to get out, kind of away from the protectiveumbrella of your parents you talked about that where you realized it was up to you, but also thisemotional journey that you're beginning on. So we're into the first act. And the first half of the first act issort of hallmarked by the hero attempting to get what they want, which is, in your case, to be safe byusing the means that they the flawed means that they have used from the beginning, which in this casewas trying to control people. Now, eventually, I'm thinking we get to a point where you feel safe withoutcontrolling people. But would you agree that during this phase, did it feel like there were ways in whichyou were beginning to change? You were beginning to see some empathy, but you were still trying to besafe by controlling everything and everyone?SPEAKER AYeah, definitely. I think that definitely describes what I was doing. And eventually it got to the point whereI did control everything and everyone.SPEAKER BIn what way?SPEAKER AEveryone did what I said. Before I went into therapy, there wasn't a single person who worked for me oreven members of my family who I didn't control in some way. I went through a time in my life where Ieven felt guilty about this when I was going to therapy. Oh, my God. Am I a narcissist? What is this? Inever controlled them to try to make money from them, to hurt them in any way. If anything, I tried toprotect them. I was trying to control people just so I would feel safe.SPEAKER BLittle like a helicopter parent controls a kid because they're afraid for the kid, but it's really about theirown insecurity.SPEAKER AExactly. I didn't do anything even remotely evil to anyone. I was a good person. Everyone liked me. But atthe same time, if you wouldn't let me be in charge, then you were out.SPEAKER BSo you told me in an interview that we did back when we first met, I had this framed as like, why youwere so unstoppable, why you were able to achieve anything. But now it feels like it might be a symptomof this wound. Honestly, you said, there's nobody in my life that I wouldn't walk away from if they told me Icouldn't do something that I wanted or needed to do. And that sounds to me like this is it, or am I offbase?SPEAKER ANo, it's totally this.SPEAKER BSo now would you distance yourself from somebody who said you couldn't do something, or would youhave a different response?SPEAKER AOne of the things that changed the most about me doing therapy is I now have zero desire to controlpeople. I feel safe even when I'm not in control.SPEAKER BWhen did that begin to happen? Do you remember a first incident? Was it pre therapy or did it take theintrospection of therapy?SPEAKER AIt took therapy, and the therapy I went through for this was extreme to the point where it angeredeveryone close to me because they thought it was dangerous and it wasn't. But it was definitely extreme.The therapist even told me I've never had to do anything that extreme.SPEAKER BOkay, I feel like I've seen a little bit of the therapy thing, and we should save that for the next episode. Butit sounds like you would agree that first that movie phase was all about still trying to control, butrecognizing that a change was necessary. And you got to the point where you'd done the 300 movies,and then did you feel like after that summer of movies, did you feel satisfied where, like, you just ate anentire cake, but you still want more? Or was it more like, no, that did the job? I feel like I understandpeople now.SPEAKER AIt was more the second.SPEAKER BIn what way? How did you quantify that? Or was there any recognition that maybe the control wasn't asnecessary as you thought?SPEAKER AMy real perspective was, I have a tool, but the toolbox wasn't complete. After the movies, I understoodemotions better.SPEAKER BBut you needed to understand them more. You needed another piece.SPEAKER ANo. Understanding emotion and even empathy is only one part of influence. So after this, I went back toschool and I majored in English. I'd always been really good in English, but the real reason why I majoredin English words are another tool that can be used to control people.SPEAKER BSo this sounds like your classic case of the universe or something tells you that there's something wrong,that a change is needed. That was your wake up call with the business and your dad's financial strugglesand all that, but it sounds like you kind of got the wrong lesson. It sounded like you felt that you justneeded to control people more and influence people more. Okay, well, that's probably a good point tostop, because I'm thinking after this, you're going to begin to see the holes in that. Can you give me aquick answer? Do you begin to see the holes in that later?SPEAKER ANo. The journey of learning how to control better and better and better lasted 15 years. The way it ended,the way I realized there was something more, was eventually I was in complete control, and I still didn'tfeel safe.SPEAKER BAll right, everybody, it's just Johnny here to close this out. We have two more episodes coming after thisone to finish the summary version of John's story, which is pretty fantastic in itself. I'll just remind you aswe close out, please be in touch. We're doing this in a vacuum. We don't really know what people arethinking unless they get in touch. So this is posted on my [email protected]. You can alwayscomment on those posts. You can reach John on Twitter at at johnmarrow jonmorrow, and you can reachme at [email protected]. And I would also encourage you if you're at all interested in thisprocess that John and I are using, where I keep coming in and I saying, as a fiction author, I'm trying tounderstand the arc, and I'm prompting him on things as if I were writing a work of fiction. And if you'recurious about that process, I wrote up a whole post about it on my [email protected]. And all youneed to do is to subscribe to the site. It doesn't cost anything. You just sign up, you enter your emailaddress, you'll get new posts and email. And in the first email, there's a link to that post that I justmentioned where I describe exactly the process that I'm using here and what goes into that. So with all ofthat said, we will see you on episode four of The Impossible Man. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnnybtruant.substack.com

LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherAfter giving listeners the ten-thousand-foot view of the Impossible Man book project and Jon’s story in Episode One, Episode Two begins the more-or-less-chronological exploration of Jon’s “character arc” as described by me, Johnny: a fiction-minded storyteller. Wondering what the hell that means? Enter your email below to get a cheat sheet of the process used to uncover Jon’s “character arc.”In this episode you’ll hear about Jon’s earliest years, when he began kindergarten and was mocked by the other children because he didn’t know what “handicapped” meant — something his mother explained very differently than most people do. The way Jon responded to those taunts might surprise you. As with the pilot, please let us know if this project is interesting to you and if we should continue! Ratings and reviews on podcast directories (like iTunes and Google Podcasts) are very appreciated and will help us a lot!TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS:NOTE: The transcript below was generated by AI and has not been edited. Accordingly, some things below are a little weird … but you’re smart, so I’m confident you can figure it out. SPEAKER AWhen you're on a table in a hospital and the doctor tells you you're going to die, there are only tworesponses. The first response is to get very afraid and then die. Second response is fuck you. I wasn'tready to die, so the fuck you response was all that was left to me.SPEAKER BWelcome to The Impossible Man, the true story of how the inability to move allowed one person to tradehis humanity for ODS defying superpowers and how he clawed his way back. Hi, and welcome to episodetwo of The Impossible Man. I am your host, Johnny B. Truant. Thanks to everyone who got in touch afterthe pilot. Clearly a lot of you out there interested, so we're going to continue. We're going to see whathappens over another few episodes. If you are still into it, be sure to let us know. The first episode of thepodcast was meant to be a complete overview of John's story and the podcast idea and the project thatwe're doing. And as such, we covered a lot of ground. We covered kind of John's general introduction, mygeneral introduction, the project's introduction, as well as a lot of his attitudes and beliefs and the idea ofthis impossibility that he has cultivated. Now, when I followed up with John to do episode two, I wanted tobe a little bit more organized, a little bit more linear. And as you heard in the previous show, I'm a fictionwriter. So I'm looking at this story as if it were a fictional story, as if John were a character. And so Imapped out the markers that would appear in a story if John were fictional. And I'm beginning to exploresome of those in this episode. Every character, before they go on their journey, begins in an ordinaryworld. And so that's a lot of what we covered in. This is what was in John's early life. What were hisattitudes when he was born? What were the dispositions of his parents, and what were the influencesthere? And how did that propel him forward into the beginning of his arc where he originally had someemotion and then learned that he had to turn it off in order to protect himself? And that is the larger arcthat we're going to continue on. And I have in mind what his inciting incident, his first act climax and allthat good stuff is, but we're going to tackle them all in order. So in this one, we really go deep and you'llsee the beginnings of how this unstoppability was forged and how John propelled himself forward andeventually got himself in some trouble that will spend the entire book trying to get himself out of. Andinterestingly, it has nothing to do with his disease, at least not as the main show. So here we arecontinuing our discussion with episode two of The Impossible Man. All right, here we are back for sessiontwo. I guess we're calling this podcast the Impossible Man. That's an evolution. We didn't know that thefirst time. Are you happy with that?SPEAKER AI am, yeah. I may be unhappy with later, but I reserve the right to be unhappy later. But for now, I am.SPEAKER BYou do well. But I think it works as a good reminder because we've been focusing on your arc, and that isobviously the point of the book. But we to some degree lost track of the point that the whole idea wasthat we're also going to try and teach people how to do this. I asked you on the one we didn't record, theone we didn't share on the podcast, and I said, Is that something you can teach? You can teach peoplehow to do impossible things. And you said yes.SPEAKER AYeah, absolutely. I was even thinking, when this eventually becomes a book, maybe that'll become anaddendum that no one gets on the podcast. What do you think of that idea.SPEAKER BHow to do impossible things so they have to get the book. You can't just cheap out.SPEAKER AYeah, I'll write you'll be able to pick it up if you're listening closely enough. But I can add a little manual,field manual to doing impossible things.SPEAKER BI like this. That's the content marketer in both of us right there. That's what that is. All right. So what I didis in between these, because last time was kind of an overview. We were all over the place. We coveredkind of your mentality and your history and all that. But I think it might make sense with if we takediversions, that's fine. But as a general through line to begin kind of telling the story in chronological order.So I wrote down on my little cheat sheet here what I believe to be the act markers in your story. The waythat I'm approaching this as the person who's going to be putting down the actual words is to suss out acharacter arc as if you were a fictional hero. So if you were a protagonist in a book, there are certainpoints that you would go through. You would begin in your ordinary world. You would have an incitingincident that kind of kicked you out of normal and taught you that something was needed attention. Youwould have the first act climax where you're going on a journey. You would have a midpoint whereeverything changes. That's the hallmark of the midpoint. You would have a dark knight of the soul, whichspoiler, we kind of already know what the Dark Knight of the Soul is probably going to be a second actclimax where you're all in on this new information, this change that you're going to realize in your arc andfinally resolution. And so I wrote down what I think are the act markers. And the arc that we decided wewere going to use was this idea of you were always confident, but in order to have that confidence, youwere angry and emotionless, in your words. Was that accurate?SPEAKER AYeah, definitely.SPEAKER BSo you kind of said, Get out of my way, world. I'll show you who I am. I'll show you what I can do. But itcost you empathy and personal relationships.SPEAKER AI was a machine.SPEAKER BWhat I had here, maybe we just kind of start with because I've never done this before in a podcast. So Iguess with the ordinary world, I'm imagining you. So this is what I'm imagining. I'm imagining young John. Imean, we have to start from the beginning, right? And so tell me the story as well as you can from thebeginning. Now, one of the things we need to keep in mind as we do this is that at the beginning, yourmom was obiwan, right? She was the mentor. She was the one where you got your unstoppable,unbreakable sort of an attitude. So I imagine a lot of this is going to be her story, but where would you liketo begin? Where does the John Morrow story begin?SPEAKER AI mean, it might be interesting to know that when I was a young child, I was not emotionless. And you canactually see it in the photography from when I was a kid, when I was, say, before I had my back surgery, Iwas your average, normal, happy go lucky kid. And then somewhere along the way, I think it was my backsurgery, the way my eyes looked completely changed. They became more dead, more distant, andthey've never really even now regained the same quality I had when I was a child.SPEAKER BWhen did you feel like you were different? Because you said at some point you became like anotherspecies. But was that after the back surgery or was that before?SPEAKER AIt probably started around the time I went to kindergarten. That was when this whole idea of othernesstook root in my mind, because I didn't feel like the other kids in kindergarten and before kindergartenwasn't really around other kids that much.SPEAKER BSo it was the lack of comparison. You basically were able to believe that everybody is like this.SPEAKER ABefore that, I don't know if even the idea of having an identity had really taken root. And I remember myfirst day of kindergarten vividly for this very reason. Up until that age, my mother had never told me I wasdisabled. And I didn't know what the word meant. I had never heard the word. I knew I had SMA, but thewhole idea of a disability or being handicapped was completely foreign. I didn't even know what thosewords meant. So when I went to school, I remember one of the children said, kind of pointed at melaughing and said, he's handicapped like kids do. And I remember I said, what's that? And he yelled out tothe whole class, he doesn't know what handicapped means. And the whole class started laughing at and Ibroke down the tears the teacher because I was like, there's this word, I don't know what it means.Everyone else thinks I'm ridiculous because I don't know what it means. And the teacher took me outsideand she said, you really don't know what henshaw means? And I said, no, I don't. And she thought aboutit for a second and she said, I think this is a conversation you're going to have to have with your mother.So I went through the whole bay, like the whole day, I was just obsessed with there's this word that I'mexpected to know and no one will tell me what it means. And just feeling really frustrated with that. And Iremember my mom picked me up from school and I went out to the car and she asked me, how was yourfirst day? And I broke down crying again. And I said, they called me candy capped and I don't know whatit means. And she got upset. I could see her, like, fuming. And I remember feeling scared because Ithought she was mad at me for not knowing what it meant. She calmed down and she said, that's okay,it's true. And I said, but what does it mean? And I remember she was silent for a really long time. For me,it seemed like an eternity. It was probably one or two minutes. And she told me it means you can't dosomething as well as someone else and you need help, is what she told me. I said, well, just like therewere other kids who didn't know their ABCs. And I did. And she said, that's exactly right. We're allhandicapped somehow.SPEAKER BPaint a picture for me here. I'm assuming you were in a power wheelchair steered by a joystick. Is thatcorrect? Yeah. There are usually rows in a classroom. Like, did you have an assigned place? Were youtoward the back? Toward the front. What did they do there?SPEAKER AThey always put me in the back because the way desks and aisles are put together, it's really hard tonavigate a wheelchair to the front if the door is in the back. So the only time I ever ended up in the frontwas when the door to the classroom was in the front, which was not very common.SPEAKER BSo the taunting, for want of a better term, that happened before class began. You were there early. Theycame in and they hadn't met you before.SPEAKER AIt was during some sort of a group activity on the first I don't remember what the group assignment was,but probably introduce yourself to the kids around you or something along those lines. But it was duringclass, so the.SPEAKER BTeacher was paying attention and in charge of the class nominally, and just kind of this just happened.SPEAKER AYeah.SPEAKER BWere you looking to the teacher for support or rescue? And they just kind of let it go on?SPEAKER AIt didn't go on very long. Once the whole class started laughing at me, the teacher immediately toldeveryone to be quiet and took me outside.SPEAKER BThat point about handicap is a really good one. I've thought of it when people say to me like, oh, you'rereally smart or something like that. And I'm like, yes, but you can fix a car and I can't fix my car. Sayingintellectual intelligence is somehow better has always struck me as OD. So this idea of you can't do somethings that other people can do as well as they can do them, but conversely, you can do things betterthan other people did. Was that the dominant I guess I'm trying to get at? Did you really truly not feel inyour bones that you were any different from them?SPEAKER AAt that point started attention because my mother wanted to preserve the idea that I was the same as anyother kid and I instinctively understood that. But at the same time, because I had gotten laughed at, I alsofelt like an outsider. And that was when the feeling started. And the whole time I went through school, thatsense of otherness just got stronger and stronger and stronger.SPEAKER BSo paint a picture of life before that. What was that home life like starting as early as you can rememberor that feels formative?SPEAKER AI was mostly just around my parents. I didn't had one other friend who had cerebral palsy. So I think in mymind it wasn't abnormal to have any sort of physical condition because my only friend had cerebral Palvis.And I remember my mother was friends with another lady who had a daughter with SMA and I saw heroccasionally. So there were no children in my life except for, I think probably saw some other kidsoccasionally, like church for short amounts of time, but wasn't really friends with any of those kids. Sothat was what my life was like.SPEAKER BOkay, how far back do you remember? So you began undying mothers and fighting for your ideas withthe story about your like when you were born and the doctor saying there's something different going onwith his legs, that sort of thing. What are those stories? Can you tell me to get this early picture?SPEAKER AOne of them was of me being diagnosed.SPEAKER BWas it apparent from birth?SPEAKER ANo, it was not. And even in my photos before one year old, my father had me dressed in sports stuff allthe time. After one years old, I'm never dressed in sports stuff and my father isn't in the picture anymoreand he's not in any photo after that point.SPEAKER BWhat's your relationship with your father like? Because I've heard so much about your mom, but I can'ttell if you had a good relationship with your dad or not.SPEAKER AMy relationship with my dad now is excellent, but my dad doesn't particularly like kids and was so scaredthat I was just going to die at any time. That he emotionally and physically distanced himself from me andpretty much disappeared from my life until I was around the age of 18.SPEAKER BHow did he disappear? Were they still married? Was he still around or did he move away?SPEAKER AThey were still married for, I think eleven years, but he literally would come home after I went to bed. Thatwas almost every day. So I actually saw him more after they got divorced, where he would take me forone day every two weeks. I saw him more at that point, and at the time I did not understand why, and Iwas immensely hurt by it.SPEAKER BDid your mom attempt to explain it?SPEAKER AShe did. She explained that it was a problem between them, but I knew instinctively that it wasn't justabout her. I even remember thinking every time I would get straight A's, my dad would take me out fordinner to celebrate. And I remember thinking, I have to get straight A's or I'm never going to see my dad.SPEAKER BAnd this was from almost the beginning, from when you went to school?SPEAKER AYeah.SPEAKER BSo when you told that anecdote about you were mostly in sports stuff and then you were not, give mesome context behind that. It sounds like maybe he wanted a sports star, and then he realized he wasn'tgoing to get one, and this was one more level of emotional distance to protect himself. Is that accurate?SPEAKER AYeah. My dad was very athletic. He got a baseball scholarship to go to college, and he was probably agood enough golfer to be on the PJ Tour. He played golf a lot. My father is kind of a hustler in the mostendearing possible way. The closest example I can think of is Mel Gibson from the movie Maverick. He'sthe spitting image of my father. He preferred to actually wait until other people won the PGA Tour, andthen you would go challenge them to a money game and he would win. So, yeah, he was a hustler. Sosports were everything to him, and he bet on everything. And the idea that I would never be able to playsports just crushed him.SPEAKER BThere are two ways to be crushed by your kid playing sports. The first is that somehow you're so investedin sports, and it's literally that as a problem. And then the second is that it's kind of just one thing to grabonto with a larger issue, like the fact that you couldn't play sports reminded him that you had what couldend up being a terminal disease. Do you think it was more like that?SPEAKER AI think it was the second one, and his life was sports and business, and I was too young to understandbusiness, so that left me with a complete lack of understanding of his life. In his mind, you don't, like, talkto your son. You play baseball with him. It was a form of communication where the idea of caulking to me,I still think he knew how you basically.SPEAKER BAlready said that you prioritized academics because that was a way to hopefully communicate with him.Is it true of business as well?SPEAKER AYes. When I turned 18, I was in that angry teenager stage, and I decided one day, I'm just going to have itout with you about this. It was one of those things I tried to bring it up a few times, but it was always hewould find a way to change the subject.SPEAKER BWhen you say bring it up, you mean your disconnect?SPEAKER AYeah. I mean, my burning question was, why were you never around during my childhood? I didn'tunderstand everything I just told you. I didn't understand any of those things. I finally cut it out with himand he didn't say anything. He just let me yell at him for a while and he started to get tears in his eyes, buthe just sat there. Then at the end, he went in the room that he had for storage, and he brought out a pileof papers and he put them in front of me, and it was this huge stack. And he told me, this is just one pile.So that a whole room of these. These were one year of medical bills. And he said, I paid all of these yourwhole life. I know it's not what you needed for me, but it's all I had. I wasn't strong enough to be there foryou emotionally. I didn't know how to connect with you. And the easiest thing to do was to bury myself inmy work and just try to forget about the whole thing. And he said, I'm so sorry. I would give anything tochange it, but I just can't.SPEAKER BSo this reminds me of when you see a personality disconnect in, say, a relationship with, like, a marriageor something, and there was this kind of humorous way. I'd heard it mentioned once with I don'tremember. There are two certain types involved here. One person says, you never tell me that you loveme. And the other one says, I'll tell you if I ever stop loving you. Like, if there's ever a problem, I'll let youknow. You can just assume that everything is fine until then. So do you see that? Because when I'mhearing that, I don't know if you intended it this way, but when you say he went into his office and hepicked up a stack of medical bills, if in a movie, there would be music swelling behind that because that'sthe moment where that is the way, at least in my I don't know what your impression is. I don't know whathis is. That is a way that he was showing his love in the only way he could. Do you see it that way at all?SPEAKER AI do. Even at age of 18, I instantly understood. I remember looking through the stack and just that oneyear was like almost half a million dollars. So we're talking very large amounts of money that he spent. Isaid something along the lines of, I can't believe it cost this much. He said, of all of my investments, youwere the greatest. I was dying of pneumonia when I was 16. It was very interestingly. The last time I hadpneumonia, and it was incredibly bad. One of my lungs was completely full of mucus. The other lung washalf full. My lungs were already only about half developed. So I was operating on 25% of my lung capacity,which would be like twelve and a half percent of a fully healthy person. So literally the doctors thought itcould be ours and I would be dead. And it was one of the many times where they told me, we don't thinkyou're going to make it. And there was a drug that I had been keeping up with and my mother at DukeUniversity. I lived in Charlotte, and it was not approved by the FDA yet. They were stolen trials forpneumonia. And when it got to the point where it was so bad they were certain I was going to die, theycalled Duke again and said, listen, he's going to die. Can we give him the drug? There's nothing to lose.And they said, yes, but it's going to take us 4 hours to drive it there. And they weren't sure I was going tomake it. So my father pulled out his checkbook and said, how much? Deborah brother on the helicopter,they said, 40 grand. And he paid it like 30, 45 minutes later, I had the drug. It was a drug that they gaveyou in the nebulizer machine. So it was like a mist. It's called plumazine. I remember later this went on tobe sold for like $1,000 a dose. They gave it to me and it immediately liquefied all of the mucus in mylungs. They turned me over a bucket and it was almost like I was vomiting out of my lungs, this like liquidmucus. And when I got done, they did an x ray. My chest was clear and this was like 2 hours after theygave me the drug. And I've never had pneumonia again.SPEAKER BI know that pneumonia has been a big deal for you. You've had it, what, 17 times?SPEAKER A16. I had it every year until 16 and then never after that.SPEAKER BDo you have any idea why?SPEAKER AI can guess. I have rational and irrational guesses. Rational guesses are I also graduated high school at 16,and I wasn't in such close proximity to kids anymore, so I was just around less bacteria. I think that's apossibility. I'd also gotten weaker to the point where I could no longer touch my face at the age of 16. Somaybe that affected it. Those are my rational reasons. My irrational reason is I felt like in that moment,something was decided between me and God. And I couldn't articulate it or put my finger on it, but that'swhat I felt like. The agreement was I wasn't going to die. That if I was going to die, that was the time.SPEAKER BHow many times have you almost died since then?SPEAKER ANever. From pneumonia, but almost died? I'd really have to think, let's say at least a half a dozen, if not adozen.SPEAKER BYou said that the drug was on your radar. The Palmerzyme. Why was it on your radar?SPEAKER AYeah, that goes back to the methodology. Because I was obsessive about tracking any drug that couldkeep me alive, even those that were not approved by the FDA, because I knew that pneumonia was mynumber one risk. And through age of ten or eleven, I started reading about the anatomy of lungs andreally, really understanding lungs. I mean, better than I can talk to any pulmonalogist about the anatomyof a lung and how pneumonia works. I also researched every drug that could help me, both ones thatwere approved and ones that weren't.SPEAKER BHow'd your family pay for this? How did they afford it?SPEAKER AMy dad had probably made ten to $20 million in real estate, and he'd spent well. Number one, he'dgotten taxed. Half of that. He'd also been through multiple divorces, and so there goes another half. Somaybe, let's say he kept two or 3 million, 4 million of that money, and nearly all of that had gone to mymedical bills.SPEAKER BWhat do you think would have happened if he hadn't had that?SPEAKER AI'd be dead.SPEAKER BSo there was no scenario in which a program or insurance would have made up the difference.SPEAKER AI was unable to get insurance. They would not get me a traditional insurance before Obamacare. And alsoMedicaid had an income test for your parents. And my dad always made too much money for me to getMedicaid. There were no options other than for him to pay.SPEAKER BIf he had less money, maybe you could have qualified for Medicaid, but I imagine you would have gottena different quality of care, right?SPEAKER AThey would have not paid for a helicopter or many of the other things. I had physical therapists that sawme, like, two to three times a week, and I didn't know it, but he was paying $100 a session for thosephysical therapists. So there were a lot of things I was not aware of that he was paying for.SPEAKER BSo I'm going to put you on the spot with what I think is probably a pretty difficult question, but I'm justcurious. So we're toying with the idea of the impossibility, like doing the impossible, using your personalvolition, using your force of will. But there are elements of this story that feel almost like providence,right? Like you couldn't control how much money your dad made you couldn't control the timing ofvarious things. That worked out just right. I'm just curious, and maybe this is out of line, I don't know, butdo you have any, like, what are your beliefs in terms of spirituality or faith or coincidence or universalalignment or any of that stuff? Do you put any stock in any of that?SPEAKER AI definitely believe in God in terms of religious tradition. I've become less and less connected to anyparticular religion. I was raised Christian. I still have very strong Christian leanings as far as my faith. Butas far as the religious orthodoxy of Christianity, it's a complete turn off to me, more around the principlesthat are attractive to me. And as far as supernatural beliefs, I 100% believe that some supernatural thingshave happened in my life, that God, for some reason has decided to keep me here. I have no idea why.SPEAKER BDo you feel a need to live up to that? Like you were spared in some way, shape, or form, and so you'dbetter perform?SPEAKER AYeah, it's my name. My name means Jehovah's gift from birth. My mother even told me your name doesn'tmean that you were a gift to me. You were a gift to the world.SPEAKER BSo if you were to guess as to what any of that means as to what you might be here for, do you have anyguesses to show.SPEAKER APeople what's possible would be my closest guess?SPEAKER BIf you were raised Christian, I'm guessing your parents were both religious. Is that accurate?SPEAKER AMy mother was. My dad kind of went along because she made him.SPEAKER BIs that a big driver as to why she believed that she could take care of you or that you were destined tosurvive or any of that?SPEAKER AYeah. This is a story that I haven't told right before my first birthday. That's when she was told I would liveuntil the age of two. And so she just prayed, like, we're talking huge amounts of prayer, like four to 8 hoursa day for that entire year. And she's convinced that before my next birthday, before my second birthday,that either the day of or the day before that god told her he will be spared.SPEAKER BDid the second birthday have sort of a deadline feel to it? Almost like if she could get you to your secondbirthday, then there was some element of, okay, I made it. And that took off some of the pressure tovarious degrees, yeah. So what would you say to somebody who's listening to this or who will read thebook, who's an atheist, who is like, yeah, I don't believe it. Would you have any response to that?SPEAKER AYeah, I have friends who are atheists. Faith is often the way we explain the unexplainable. What I look atis you either believe that God exists and that he has a plan for my life, or you believe that I'm. Theluckiest man in history. One of the two. And I don't think there are really other options. If you want to, youcan chalk it up to luck, but I don't personally believe it's possible for anyone to be that lucky. It would bethe equivalent of rolling snake eyes like a thousand times in a row. That's how lucky you would have to be.SPEAKER BAnd that rolling snake eyes a thousand times in a row is surviving things that were absolutely supposed tokill you, according to all the doctors. It's a sequence of those things.SPEAKER AEven getting a father who could afford to pay all those medical bills, it's either luck or providence.SPEAKER BWhere does your impossibility thinking, your volition, your stubbornness, your reading, the FDA clearingon drugs and stuff, where does that fit in? Because on one pole is extreme luck. That's entirely passiveand you're lucky. And on the other extreme is that God is somehow having a plan for your life. And again,you're passive in that. So where do you put your efforts and your ability to do the impossible, implyingsome action on your part?SPEAKER AMy mother's attitude, I don't think she ever said this explicitly, but her attitude was god agreed to let youlive because I spent a year in prayer. So it was action, result. And so I very much grew up with thementality that, yes, there was opportunity, yes, God had a plan for my life, but it's something I had to fightfor.SPEAKER BThere are some characterizations of prayer that are almost like a deep meditation that a yogi might do toslow down his heartbeat or something like that, or things that aren't normally in control. But prayer beingequated to, let's say, something that doesn't necessarily need to be religious in nature, but that it'ssomething that has an effect because of various other things that might be New Age or not. Where do youcome down on any of that?SPEAKER AI don't know.SPEAKER BDo you pray?SPEAKER AI do. And I feel the connection to something larger than myself. When I pray, do I hear words speakingabout to me? No, I don't. But I feel a connection to something larger. It feels like there's something there.SPEAKER BOkay, so let's go back to early life. So this is me pausing and going back to this is pre kindergarten. Canyou give me some flavor there? How did you spend your days? You mentioned that you had a friend ortwo. You had the friend with cerebral palsy and all that. How were your days spent? What did you do?What were you into? What were your interactions?SPEAKER AThis makes me smile now. I was into WWF wrestling. I loved wrestling. I loved monster trucks. I lovedelectric remote control cars. I loved action figures. I had a whole bunch of soldiers and GI. Joe andeverything. Action figures. I idolized Michael Jordan. And part of the reason was because my father wasfriends with Michael Jordan's father. They were really close friends. So I got to meet Michael severaltimes. I just idolized it. So I had Michael Jordan paraphernalia all over the place becky gave me andsigned.SPEAKER BDid he give you any of that stereotype sports personality words of encouragement and advice?SPEAKER AHe never said much of anything to me. I think that every now and again he would make like a tour throughthe hospital, see all the sick kids. And I think to him I was a friend of his parents and just kind of anotherstop along the way. I would be surprised if he remembers because he did what he did for me. For a lot ofkids, other than that close connection to Michael Jordan, I don't feel like my life was all that different fromyour average less than five year old boy. Maybe a little bit less physical. I like to go fishing with a bobber,a little float thing. And I would catch because we lived on a lake, Lake Norman. And my dad would justtake the fish and fill him back. I do remember at the age of about four years old, I don't know if it was thefirst time I caught a fish, but it was the first time my dad was with me when I caught a fish. And he tookthe hook out. He put it on, I don't know. We call them stringers. They're these strings with, like, hooks onthem to keep the fish until you're ready to leave. And when we left, he gave me the stringer and he said,Carry it home. So I did, went inside, showed it my mother showed her my little tiny fish that I caught. Andmy dad pulled by the cutting board and put the fish on the cutting board and gave me a knife and said,cut off its head. It was moving. I don't know if it was still alive. And my mother started to say, no, don't dothat. And he got really mad and he said, let him do it still. I'd use my hands at the time. So I cut off hishead and I was still crying, probably even harder. And he slapped, not hard, but enough to get myattention. And he said, never be ashamed of putting food on the table for your family.SPEAKER BWhat do you think that was about? Do you think that was about yet another defensive mechanism that hehad that he wanted you to be capable? Or do you think that that was like a real lesson that you then tooklater? Because like you said earlier, this is going to benefit my checking account and I'm not ashamed ofit. That sounds like cousin to it.SPEAKER AI think it was the same lesson that he would have taught any son. It was a very hard lesson about the roleof a man in the world, is that you had to not pay attention to your emotions and you had to take care ofyour family and you had to put food on the table, which would be a metaphor for money.SPEAKER BWell, I'm noticing some synchronicities here, and I'm wondering if they're just imagined or if they're realsynchronicities. So first of all, you made the comparison in the first episode about your friend who wrotethe book comparing entrepreneurs to hunters to hunter gatherers. So that's a direct connection. And itmakes me wonder. You said that you need to ignore your emotions and just do what needs to be done.And you're talking at age four and at age five you started kindergarten. And I'm guessing that's when youdeveloped some of that emotional intensity and that kind of like beginning of the emotionlessness. Wasthere any connection there?SPEAKER AProbably. So that's the first time I can remember. Well, that was one other time I needed a shot. I don'tremember if it was a vaccine or what it was, but I was young, I was probably two or three years old. Andmy father took me to the doctor and I kept trying to run away from the doctor every time the doctorwould try to give me the shot. And when the doctor gave me the shot, I started crying. And my dadsmacked me hard when I started crying and told me, don't cry, I remember I kept crying even harderthen. And he told me, I'm going to keep hitting you until you stop. And I stopped.SPEAKER BThis was age what again?SPEAKER ATwo or three.SPEAKER BSo do you think that this was all because what I'm hearing is latent suggestions that your mind latercapitalized on. It sounds like you got these suggestions from your dad whether you realized it or not. Andthen later it's almost like, oh, turning that off is an option. Do you think there's a connection there?SPEAKER AI definitely chose to turn off my emotions and I realized it was an option. I also, in retrospect, do not thinkI would have survived if I kept.SPEAKER BMy emotions on early school years.SPEAKER AYou mean up until probably about the age of twelve? Those were immensely painful years.SPEAKER BAnd then around twelve was when you said, I'm going to turn this off.SPEAKER ANo, it was even earlier. I probably started in kindergarten.SPEAKER BWell, that was also on my questions to ask was, what did you do when those kids were laughing at youand stuff? Did you take it for a little while and then turn I remembered taking.SPEAKER AIt until the first grade. And I remember in the first grade, I deliberately picked out the biggest bully in theclass and became friends with them so that nobody would mess with.SPEAKER BHow'D you do that.SPEAKER AThe first thing I did, I walked up and I gave him one of my video games and I said, have you played this?And he said no. I said, well, you can have it. And we started playing video games together after that. Iremember he came to my house one time and my father said he can't ever come back because his fatheris a drug dealer, so he never got to come back.SPEAKER BBut he was a badass, though, it sounded like. Is this the kind of kid who brought a knife to school?SPEAKER AHe was that kind of kid, yeah.SPEAKER BCan you tell me anything else about him? Like what he looked like, the sort of trouble he got into,anything like that?SPEAKER AHe was black. He was really tall. He was poor. I don't think I realized at the time. Like the kind of poorwhere all of his clothes were used. He didn't have anything new. I remember he struggled to read, and Ihelped him, used to read to him, but only when no one was around and no one could see.SPEAKER BDid he have a crew that he ran with and a tough guy image.SPEAKER ATo uphold later on in second or third grade he did, and he stopped having anything to do with me.SPEAKER BWell, that's what I was going to wonder, is you would think that that kind of kid might have an initialprejudice, but it sounds like in first grade he didn't.SPEAKER ANo.SPEAKER BAnd that worked. That kept the other kids at bay. Because you were with him.SPEAKER AYes.SPEAKER BAnd so what happened when your protector wasn't around anymore in second grade and beyond?SPEAKER AOne time I got my arm broken. I always had quite a mouth on me. I learned to give more than I got. Ilearned to defend myself with words to the point that people would eventually get mad enough tobecome physically violent even knowing that I was in a wheelchair, because I would just make them feelso stupid. And one day, I don't remember what I said, but one of the kids pulled my arm around behindmy wheelchair and told me to take it back or he was going to break my arm. And I didn't take it back and.SPEAKER BHe broke my this was like your ordinary suburban high school. What was the kind of the makeup and thedemographic and all that? I know it was in Charlotte.SPEAKER AThis was even before high school. This was in middle school, 7th or 8th grade, a lot of poorer kids, publicschool. He was definitely a poor kid. I ended up becoming friends with him afterwards. I'd had so manybroken bones up to that point. I knew it wasn't broken all the way through, that it was only cracked. Andso I didn't tell my mother and I never went to the doctor. But to this day, I can still very easily tell if abone's broken and how bad. I didn't cry when you broke it. I didn't make it sound. And the next day, Iremember I stole all of his books out of his backpack and killed him. And he couldn't do his homeworkand started getting zeros on all of his homework assignments. And I told him, I took your books and I'mnot giving them back unless you apologize.SPEAKER BIn elementary school and I guess into middle school, what was kind of your role in the high school?Because early on, you paint a picture as a kid who definitely took some shit and it sounds like along theway. But it also sounds like your mouth got you in trouble as much as, or more than just kind of likespontaneous bullying. So were you kind of like a rascal? Were you popular in certain quarters? Were youquiet and you vanished into the background? Like, what were your relationships? What was all that like?SPEAKER AI was an intellectual bullet. I would not have called it that at the time, but looking back, that's exactly howI was.SPEAKER BSo lording your intelligence or manipulating people? Or both.SPEAKER ABoth.SPEAKER BGive me some examples of the sorts of things that you would do.SPEAKER AThe worst example is there was another kid in the wheelchair that was not as smart as me. Kid,dasheen's, muscular. His name was Josh. And the school couldn't afford to pay for two caregivers, so theyput us both in the same class so one caregiver could help us both. So I was in every class with Josh forseveral years, and I used to do anything I could do, say anything I could say on a daily basis to make himrage to the point of not having any sense in his head. He used to cry when things got really bad, so I usedto make crying faces behind the teacher's back, like pouty lips Adam, and might whine at him when theteacher wasn't looking. I eventually figured out that his mother was a soft spot, so I would make up long,convoluted stories about his mother doing terrible things and tell it to a crowd of kids.SPEAKER BTerrible things? Like embarrassing? Like sexual things?SPEAKER AYes.SPEAKER BWhy did you do that?SPEAKER AIn my mind, the only way to be safe was to make other people afraid of me. And he was the easy one topick on, that no one else would mess with me.SPEAKER BSo it was a little like attacking the biggest guy in prison on day one.SPEAKER AYeah, and I was ruthless. We used to race, too, and in multiple years, he never beat me in a race, evenwhen he had a faster chair, because I would literally plan the angles to run into his chair and to rip thewheels off. I mean, one time I even remember, I hit into his chair and part of the metal on his chair madea big gash down my leg, probably like a three inch gash, and I just kept racing. And one time he hadanother kid pushing to try to win, and I took my foot rest, which are really hard aluminum, and I kept themin the back of the knees going as fast as I could, and they couldn't walk after that? Yeah, I was justabsolutely vicious.SPEAKER BDid people like you, like, did you have were you were popular?SPEAKER AI was, yeah. But it was mostly because nobody else liked Josh and because they didn't want me to do thatto them.SPEAKER BWhere was the progress of your emotionlessness at this point? Were you fully like, okay, I'm just going todo what I need to survive, and I don't give a shit about anybody else?SPEAKER AI was 80% there.SPEAKER BDid your mom watch this and did she have thoughts on it?SPEAKER AI was so good at manipulating it and hiding it. My mom never saw it, and neither did any teacher.SPEAKER BSo you were convinced this was the secret, right? Like this was the way to survive. It didn't strike you aswrong at the time? No, because it was survival.SPEAKER ASurvival, yeah.SPEAKER BWas high school any different? Was high school more of the same?SPEAKER AHigh school, I went 100% there, but I was more isolated from the other kids. I had a caregiver on my own.He was very good to me in many ways. He was a father to me. He was my caregiver for 16 years. He wasthe ex bus driver for the high school. And because I had a fully grown man with me, nobody messed withme. I didn't need to defend myself. But it was intensely important to me that the teacher always knew Iwas the smartest kid.SPEAKER BSo you didn't feel the need to defend yourself, but you did feel an intense need to prove yourself?SPEAKER AIn some ways, it was the same thing. If another kid spoke up in class and their answer wasn't perfect, Iwould pick it apart.SPEAKER BSo it sounds to me, as a third party, like you were maximizing maybe the evil side of what your mom toldyou originally. I mean, a euphemism for handicapped is differently abled, but in this case, it sounds likethat is literally how you were approaching it.SPEAKER AIs.SPEAKER BIt was you had some shortcomings, other people had shortcomings, but they were both shortcomings.And that's kind of what this sounds like to me. Is that accurate? That you were just trying to emphasizeyour strength so that the shortcomings weren't noticed?SPEAKER AYou're being nice, putting it that way, it was more of you took advantages of my weaknesses, now I'mgoing to take advantage of yours.SPEAKER BHow does that feel, looking back?SPEAKER AFeels terrible. The final year that I was in school, josh was in a different class. He wasn't tormented by meanymore. I graduated two or three years before he did. I graduated a year early, and I think he graduateda year late. He was not the sharpest pencil. It was a struggle for him to get through school. I remembergoing up to him at lunch every on graduation and apologizing. He told me he hated my guts and to get thefuck out of it. About three or four years later, he died, and I called his mom and asked why she didn'tinvite me to the funeral. She told me, he hated your guts until he died and so do I.SPEAKER BHow much of that played into kind of a wake up call for things to change? Or was that after you'd alreadybegun to kind of pick away at that?SPEAKER ABy that point when his mother told me that, I felt nothing.SPEAKER BSo if you felt nothing, what inspired you to apologize in the first place?SPEAKER AThere was something still trying to be a good person. And I think it was because a part of me felt like, yes,it's okay for me to use my intellectual gifts to embarrass other kids who have normal bodies, but here's akid who had neither intellectual or physical gifts, and this is what you did.SPEAKER BAnd I felt some shame, but it was mostly intellectual. It sounds like rather than deeply emotional.SPEAKER AYeah, it wasn't emotional. When he told me he hated me, I felt nothing.SPEAKER BSo when you look back on that person that you were back then, what would you tell that kid? I'm trying toget a comparison between mature John and early John, and it feels tragic.SPEAKER AThere's nothing you could have told me. The only thing, the only way out was to break me. And so that'swhat life did.SPEAKER BLife broke you? Was there an event?SPEAKER AThe thing that broke me was when my girlfriend was ripped. That's what broke me.SPEAKER BThat was much later, though, correct?SPEAKER AYeah. I had started the process of healing at that point, but it was like this final huge blow that was moredifficult than anything I experienced myself. And part of the reason was it didn't happen to me.SPEAKER BSo you had to develop empathy because otherwise you never would have felt anything for it.SPEAKER AYeah.SPEAKER BWhat were some of those early markers? Back in sort of the Josh era.SPEAKER AI was in Boy Scouts and I used to teach other kids and Boy Scouts. I never felt the need to prove mysuperiority in Boy Scouts because it.SPEAKER BWas a different environment.SPEAKER AI mean, if I had to logically guess the answer, it's because my dad didn't care.SPEAKER BYou felt that your dad cared in school? Subconsciously, yeah.SPEAKER AI had to be the best.SPEAKER BAll right, everybody, just Johnny again here. I'm just going to close this up by just reminding everybodythis is still kind of a pilot. We're going to keep going for a while because we got enough feedback thatpeople were interested in this, that it was piquing some curiosity. But it's not a lot of people. And so ifthere are more of you and you really want to make yourselves known, please do that again. The way to dothat is to contact John at johnmarrow on Twitter. That's J-O-N-M-O-R-R-O-W. You can [email protected]. I do. Of the hjohnnybtruant.com. And something to note is that people haveasked sort of about this process. What is this process of taking a fictional structure and attempting to puta real person into it? If you are curious about that, I created kind of a little cheat sheet as to how I'm goingthrough this and how I'm using this fictional structure, this hero's journey structure, to find John's Arcs.But if you subscribe at my [email protected], it's free. It doesn't cost you anything. If you dothat, then in the first email that you get, I will link you to a page where I wrote out the steps of thisprocess. So hopefully that's a little bit more understandable. But as with anything you have, anyquestions, questions for me, questions for John, questions about the project, don't hesitate to get intouch. Thank you for listening. We will be back next time with episode three where we'll begin to see howJohn's arc continued and how it expanded and how that emotional callous began to grow and how it gothim into some trouble for both of us. Thanks for listening. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnnybtruant.substack.com

LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherIn this pilot episode, we cover Jon’s background, why he’s teamed up with me to tell his story in a forthcoming book, all about the confidence and downright cockiness that became both his salvation and his curse, and the timeline of the slow nerve degeneration from the disease that today has left him unable to move anything but his face: Spinal Muscular Atrophy, or SMA. We’re releasing this first episode in order to determine whether there is enough interest in this series for us to continue it. So if you enjoy this and would like to hear more, please let us know! To do so, you can comment below, subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast directory, and ideally leave us good ratings and reviews. If you’d like to reach Jon directly, the best place is on Twitter. If people are into it, we’d love to continue … so let’s hear it!Curious about the process? Enter your email below to get a cheat sheet of the process we used to uncover Jon’s “character arc.” TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS:NOTE: The transcript below was generated by AI and has not been edited. Accordingly, some things below are a little weird … but you’re smart, so I’m confident you can figure it out. SPEAKER AThere are children of the darkness and there are children of the light. I was born in the dark withmonsters, and to survive I became a bit of a monster. And then at a certain point in my life, I stepped intothe world of the light and out of the world of monsters and I had to learn how to survive. You.SPEAKER BWelcome to The Impossible man the true story of how the inability to move allowed one person to tradehis humanity for ODS defying superpowers and how he clawed his way back. Hey, everybody. My name isJohnny B. Truant. I will be playing host for what I believe is going to be a very interesting behind thescenes look at a project that I am doing with and for John Morrow. Now, if you don't know either one ofus, I am a fiction author. I have written over a hundred books. I've been doing this for about ten or twelveyears. John Morrow is kind of a copywriting guy, kind of a content marketing guy, a writing guy, a blogger,a guy who teaches blogging, a consultant general all around internet badass. I would say that's certainlyhow I met him. But what it took me a long time to realize after hearing John's reputation and just thinkingof him as this larger than life personality was that he actually can't move anything but his face. I just knewwhat was inside first. And that's unusual because with somebody like John, usually people see what'soutside first. They see that he is in not just a wheelchair, not just a power wheelchair, but a powerwheelchair that he operates and drives exclusively by blowing into and sucking on a small tube. He has acondition called spinal muscular atrophy or SMA, which is sort of a cousin to ALS, also known as LouGehrig's disease. SMA is a little bit more mobile than that, but not very mobile at all. With just his faceand his voice, he has built a multimillion dollar business and just generally been one of the mostunstoppable people that I have ever met. John, being a writer and being somebody who has a way ofknocking people onto their ass with his writing, has written several posts about his condition and aboutbeing unstoppable in a way that it's kind of astonishing how unstoppable he is. And it's not just within therealms of his disease. He is unstoppable personally. Regardless. It's John's mentality that has made thingsthat seem to be entirely impossible possible. He has defied what seem like impossible ODS over andover again, both with things that seem to be within volitional control and things that seem like nobodycould control them. Like his health, john has survived close brushes with death many times. He has beentold by doctors many times that he would not live through a given ordeal. He's somebody with an attitudethat has somehow transformed his physical reality. I know how that sounds, but it is true. And as youlisten to this series, you'll find it. So publishers and others have been on John to tell this story for a longtime. And he keeps procrastinating, he keeps not doing it. He knows that it could be an instant bestseller.He knows that he could get a very large advance for it. But delving in, even as a writer, even though he's avery good writer, and even though he has a very good story, delving into it, actually penning the wordswould be too painful. And so John asked me if I would co write the book with him. We thought it might beinteresting to record the process of me discovering John's story. And there's a very particular slant to that,because uncovering his story could mean recounting the events in his life as they occur. And this is verydifferent from that. Just recounting the story in an autobiography doesn't really give you the lesson. AndJohn and I really wanted to convey sort of how this unstoppable personality was forged and how to do theimpossible. But in order to do that, we need to see how the listener can relate to John as a person fromwhere they stand, where things that are impossible tend to remain impossible. And that's one of thereasons that John wanted to work with me, a fiction author, to write this book, is because I believe that lifeis a story and that there's a lot of noise that crowds what could be a character arc, as if it were designedby an author. But most people don't see it because of all of the noise, because of all of the competingstimuli in our world. But if you delve Deep and I've written a whole book about this called The StorySolution, co written with Sean Platt, where we talk about picking out the pieces of life that, whenassembled together, can be a cogent story arc, you as the protagonist, you have an inciting incident at thebeginning. You have a first act climax, you have a midpoint, you have a second act climax. You have anemotional arc that needs to be developed to reach your fullest potential. And when John started thinkingabout that and we started looking at John Morrow as a character not fictional, but in real life, you canclear away the noise and see that he had an emotional arc that not only made this possible. But thathighlights what could have been a potential tragedy in his life, not as his health, but instead as somethingentirely different. Because we're both entrepreneurs, because we both think outside the box, we decidedthat we wanted to record the process of uncovering John's story so that you'll see how it came about andjust kind of to see if people are interested in it. And that's what this is. This is a pilot. Now, in subsequentepisodes of this, if everybody enjoys this and we want to continue it. I have the act markers of John as acharacter. I know when he reached his crisis points, when he pivoted in general because of this interviewthat you're about to hear and because of other times that we've spoken before. And I'll begin to have himtell his story linearly. But this first one is to give you the full picture. And so we're going to covereverything in this one now to get a.SPEAKER CFew of the things out of the.SPEAKER BWay so that I don't have to ask John what both of us already know. Here are some things that you need toknow as you listen forward again. John has spinal muscular atrophy. It's a condition where he slowly lostthe ability to move everything but his face. And so John spends his working hours in a power wheelchair,hooked up with all sorts of doodads that allow him to work with only his face. So if I had video of thisrecording, john has a rectangular object that's connected to an arm that's in front of his face, and it's a lipmouse. So he's able to move a cursor around on a screen using his lips. Most of what he does is withdictation. Now, another thing about SMA is he can feel everything. All of his sensory neurons work, but hismotor neurons, except for the ones that directly feed his face, don't. So in the interview that follows, I'mbeginning to suss out some of the themes that are in John's story and to begin to build what will becomethis rather epic story that's very different from what the earlier people who wanted John to write his bookwanted. They wanted the Hallmark version. And John said, that's not the truth. There's something else,there's another truth behind it. And I think it's something that's relevant to anybody who is drawing breath.So I hope you enjoy.SPEAKER CHere's our talk. Hey, John. How are you?SPEAKER AI'm great. Good to be talking again.SPEAKER CThis is the second time that we've talked about this, but since we decided that we were going to do this,what I'm gonna I'm gonna call it a podcast. You can't see it's audio only, but I'm putting it in air quotesbecause it's kind of a podcast. But it's really our attempting to determine what the story is actually goingto be and what's going to go into it. And people might be interested. The idea is that if we have a goal forthe book, which we do, which is this idea of teaching the impossible and if you're the main character ofthis book, even though you're a real person and everything we're going to convey is real. We want to finda story that is like the focused thread that most clearly conveys this impossible thing. Right. Becausethere's all sorts of things that you've done in your life that have no real relevance to the story that we'retrying to tell. So I'm looking at this through the lens of a fiction author. Why did you like the idea of afiction author being involved in this project with you?SPEAKER ABecause I think my life more closely resembles fiction than the average autobiography in my life. There'sa very real story arc with everything I'm doing, and I think ultimately, even for autobiographies orbiographies, often what makes the best ones are the ones that are actually the best stories. And peopleget a little pure obsessed with reporting every detail or reading every detail. I don't think a chronologicalcatalog of everything that's happened in my life would be particularly interesting. But I do think there arecertain themes and three arcs that you've picked out that are actually hard for me to see exactly whatthey are that will ultimately end up making something that's both true and profoundly enjoyable andimpactful for the reader.SPEAKER CI actually think that anybody who's living their life well has a story embedded in it that feels like fiction,but there's too much noise that's baked into, like because people get obsessed with, well, my latestInstagram post didn't get enough followers, and that feels like a crisis, but it's not. It's really just noiseagainst the background of what you might actually be trying to do with your life. And, I mean, that is thepremise of the story solution. The book that I sent you is like, life can be like a story, but you need to findthe storylines and focus in on the things that are actually relevant. The example that I give is when we sawThe Dark Knight, we didn't watch Batman watching TV in the evenings. Like, for some reason, we only sawthe scenes where he was that were relevant to his crime fighting. So we did figure out a lot of this stufflast time, and I was going to regardless of whether we were recording this or not, I was going to kind ofread back to you what I got out. Of the last session, because I went and I listened back to it, and therewere some moments where I was like, oh, this is awesome. This is exactly the arc that we're looking for.Why this book at all? You've had people asking you about it. But I mean, it's obvious to me I've knownyou, but for people who don't necessarily know, they know that you're a copyright, a copying guy and awriting guy, but they might not know this unstoppable aspect. Can you talk about that?SPEAKER AYeah. I'm doing it for a few different reasons. One is very self serving, and that is my story is an asset. It'sthe reward of having lived so many difficult things. And I've come to a point in my career where I nolonger want to be just a copywriting or a blogging guy or even a writing guy. I want to step out onto abigger stage. And part of that process is giving your audience the chance to get to know you. And the waythat you do that is by telling your story. And so one of the reasons why I'm doing it, not the only one, isthat I think it's necessary for me to get to where I want to go and that it will be immensely beneficial to mycareer and to my checking account. I don't apologize for that either. A lot of people would. But I think it'sthe way the world works. The other reason is I think that the first step to building the life you want foryourself is believing. It's possible. And it's where most people actually get stuck. The reason why so manypeople procrastinate about building the life they want isn't that they don't know what to do. It's that downdeep they feel like this will never work. And I think that my story is the antidote to that particular form ofpoison.SPEAKER CWhen you say that particular poison. So that's the idea that you may know what you want I'm sorry, youmay know what to do and you may know where you're going, both of those things, and you believe it,maybe even on a conscious level, maybe even you're like, okay, I can figure out how to do this. But it's notsort of gut deep realization. And that's what you really need is that confidence that comes from waydown. Is that basically what you're saying?SPEAKER AYeah. If someone said, Would you be willing to bet your life? Where you would say, of course.SPEAKER CAnd I know that this is, I'm sure, a big topic and we haven't even really broached it, but I can't think of anyparticular things. But I've had this realization recently where there's knowing and believing and I'm a prettyconfident person too, so there's knowing and believing, but then there's this extra special level, and Icouldn't tell you how to make the leap from one to the other. Do you consciously know how to do that, oris it just repetition and exposure?SPEAKER AI think it's repetition and exposure. When I look back in my story, I was less certain of my success but stillwilling to bet my life, by the way, than I am now. Now, one of the biggest dangers I have, when you'vedone the impossible a hundred times, it's very easy to believe that you can always do it. And that's justnot true. Eventually there will come a time where you'll fail. That's just the way life works. If you are ajujitsu fighter, eventually you're going to come across someone better than you are. And the biggestdanger to me now is that after having won so many battles, I automatically assume I'll win the next one.And so I'm not sure it's a good thing, it's actually a bad thing.SPEAKER COr it's a two edged sword. Because if you go confidently. We both know this phenomenon where,especially if other people are involved, the surety that you bring into it increases your likelihood ofsuccess.SPEAKER AIt does. As long as you don't go into the territory of, I'm so good, I don't have to prepare. I don't have totake this seriously. This person is a joke. This situation is a joke. That's how you end up getting beaten.And thankfully, I've managed to avoid that, but it's by being aware of the danger.SPEAKER CDid you always have that awareness? Because we've and I want to I do want to break down some of thethings that we talked about last time, because I'm wondering if this is the answer here. I don't know,because we've talked and we've joked. Like, I wrote a post and I joked about the big John Morrow ego,and I know you embrace that, but is that something did you have that? I don't know if you would call thatit's not exactly humility, but it's a sense of fallibility, I would say. Did you develop that over time or fromthe beginning? Were you so overconfident? These are the same thing. Were you so overconfident at thebeginning and then you learned it? Or is this something you knew from the beginning that you always hadto be prepared and couldn't assume?SPEAKER AI had huge problems when I was in college. In retrospect, they were small problems, but I got kicked outof Computer science at my university because I was so confident that I was better than the teachers, andI probably was, but I looked for ways to make them look foolish in front of the whole class, to embarrassthem. And eventually, after two teachers in a row complained about me despite getting good grades, thechair invited me into his office and said, you can no longer continue in our department. And that's how Ibecame an English major, because I got kicked out of computer science around the same time I gotkicked out of church because I got really serious about I was like, if I'm going to be a Christian, I need toread the Bible. And so I did. I read it cover to cover, like, 20 times. I eventually got so familiar with theBible that I would then raise my hand in church and ask the pastor questions and reference Scripture.And it got so disruptive that he asked me not to come back to church.SPEAKER CWhat age was that?SPEAKER AI was probably, like, 19, 1819.SPEAKER COkay. So this actually brings up something that I hadn't even thought about, but you casually mention Iraised my hand in church. Were you able to physically raise your hand at age 19?SPEAKER AAt that time, I think I was not very high, but I think I was yeah.SPEAKER CCan you give me the timeline, by the way? Because I don't know. I mean, I've I've read your posts. I knowthat you had physical symptoms that were from when you were born that were clear to the doctors thatthere was something wasn't quite right. But what was the timeline of the progress of SMA?SPEAKER AThere were a couple of long periods of very slow decline with occasional fast bursts. So I never walked,but I was able to crawl and I was able to stand if assisted. So, like, if you held onto my shoulders, like, Icould kind of support myself when I was a child.SPEAKER CAnd that was true at what age?SPEAKER ALike two, maybe up until five. I lost that strength when I had spinal surgery when I was seven, I was in bedfor like, six months, and that robbed me of a bunch of strength. When I got done with that, I could nolonger stand or support myself. I could still move my arms, but I had pretty much nothing in my legs afterthat.SPEAKER CAnd how long did you keep mobility in your arms?SPEAKER AUntil I turned. It was a gradual decline. First I lost my left arm, then I lost my right arm at the age of 21, 22,something like that. And the way it happened is I kept getting weaker and weaker. And one day after I'dgraduated, I was going back for a master's class, and on the campus there was a big hill. And I was goingdown the hill, and my arm slipped forward and pushed the joystick forward to where the chair was goingfull speed, and I couldn't move my arm back. And so literally, I was going top speed of the chair down thishill, and I couldn't stop. And there was this couple kissing on the part bench down at the bottom of thehill, and I ran right into the bench and flipped it over. And I was so mortified that I knew at that momentthat was the end. And I went to the wheelchair shop and I said, Next option, please. And so we moved tosip and puff.SPEAKER CHow does that work when you move around in your chair?SPEAKER AI have a straw in my mouth, and we have four different directions. We have forward, backward, left andright. When I want to go forward, I blow in hard. It's what they call a hard puff. And the chair will keepmoving forward until I do a strong sip, until I suck in hard. If I blow end card again, it speeds up. If I wantto turn left, I suck in softly. If I want to turn right, I blow in softly. But when you go backwards, I have to bestopped first, and then I suck in hard.SPEAKER CHow long did it take you to get the feel of that? Because having seen you do this, your control is quiteprecise for something that is being done with breath. I mean, you're getting through doorways and you'llstop and adjust slightly. So how long did it take to.SPEAKER AFigure that out about two weeks.SPEAKER COkay, so is it not as difficult, or you're just a very good student?SPEAKER AI'm fast. It's hard. It requires being able to do very precise breaths, and not everyone can do that.SPEAKER COkay. So those people just really need to kind of work on it, obviously, because it's the only option.SPEAKER AIt is either that or be pushed.SPEAKER CI'm curious. When you are 1619 over that spectrum and into college and you're losing function that youhad, and especially since your arc is an emotional arc, which we can talk about in a second, I mean, Ican't even imagine that sounds devastating.SPEAKER AIt wasn't, because it probably should have been because I'd been with it since birth. Imagine if you wereborn into a world where everyone became weaker as they got older. It wouldn't be emotionallydevastating. It would just be normal. That's just what happens. So I just viewed it as, this is normal. This iswhat happens. And I just accepted it and moved on.SPEAKER CBut you don't live in a world where that happens with everyone. So you were seeing other people. Did thatnot bother you?SPEAKER AI think this is a core part of what makes my story my story. When I was a child, I did not view otherpeople as the same. I was in a category of one in my own mind, almost as if we weren't even the samespecies. That's the way I thought about things.SPEAKER CSee, now that's your answer. But it just prompts more questions for me. It makes me say what you've justdescribed. That still sounds devastating to me. Because you're alone. I mean, I know you aren't alone. Iknow you had your parents and you have caregivers and you have friends and all that stuff. But being if Iwere in that condition, if I were in that position, and my brain said, Well, I'm the only one, and in thisworld, everyone meaning me, one person, everyone in this category gets weaker as they go, do yourealize how unique of a viewpoint that is? I don't think most people think that. I think most people wouldthink I'm the only one, and that sucks because I'm degenerating and others are not. But that's not whatyou did. And that's kind of key to this story in my mind.SPEAKER ANumber one, I was lonely all the time. I didn't know at the time what to call it, but I was lonely all the time.And my response was anger, not sadness. It was, well, then fuck you. I'm going to show you who I am.That was my response.SPEAKER CI'm wondering if your determination was that thing where it is. I'm going to show you your power is youranger because you're so determined to show everybody. Is that accurate?SPEAKER AYeah. This gets dark, but when you're on a table in a hospital and the doctor tells you you're going to die,this happened to me multiple times. There are only two responses to that. The first response is to getvery afraid and then die. Second response is fuck you. Those are the only two responses. And I wasn'tready to die. So the fuck you response was all that was left to me at that point.SPEAKER CI called it practical belief, choosing what to believe rather than looking at the world and saying,objectively, there's a truth out there and I can accept it or bargain with it. It's like this decision to believewhat is most practical in the moment. And it sounds to me like the fuck you response to I'm going to die.There's no downside. There no because if you're wrong, you're dead and who cares?SPEAKER AYeah. And if you had asked me, could you be wrong, I would have said yes. I wasn't like in my own dreamworld, I knew that it was an irrational response, but I didn't care because the alternative was justunacceptable to me. I wasn't ready to die.SPEAKER CWhen I'm creating a lead character who's going to go through some sort of a hero's journey, it's best ifthey don't have if they have an emotional journey to make. So at the beginning, the hero does not have atrait that they're going to eventually need to succeed. They're going to attempt to do things the waythey've always done them in their own comfortable, flawed way, which is driven by a wound. And thenthey reach a cris point where they have to go on a journey. And then act two, the 50% middle of a movie,so from 25% to 75% ish of a movie, and it's about the same in a book, is usually an attempt to get whatthey want by using the old ways where they're working from their wound. So when we were talking aboutall of this and I'm trying to find a story that is both amazing and not relatable at all because it's so uniquethat you have that impossibility that everybody is going to want it to learn to do. And I'm trying to squarethat with this need to have some sort of brokenness at the beginning that you're going to realize andoutgrow. I started with confidence. If you remember when we were talking a few days ago and I said,okay, so when did you get this resilience and confidence? And you're not going to get in my way. Itdoesn't matter what's going on with me. I'm going to win. And you said, I've always had it. And you alsosaid, and this is ironic because you just talked about getting weaker. You said, I've never felt weakmentally. And so what we've kind of thought about and we kind of figured out was this idea that you kindof developed an emotional callous. And this sounds like the same sort of thing where the arc that youhave had beyond your childhood into adulthood and continuing on has been you've always had thisunstoppability. You've always had this idea to take apart and figure out how to make anything work, evenif it seems like it should be impossible. But at the same time, you had to say fuck you to the world to doit. You had to be angry to do it. And you told me the other day that you had basically no emotion up untilan age where you kind of had to begin experiencing some of that. So is that about right?SPEAKER AYeah, totally right. Not only that, but the identity that I adopted was as not a human. I didn't even believe Iwas the same.SPEAKER CIn what way?SPEAKER AThe logic at the time was a human could never survive this, therefore, I am not one.SPEAKER CHow did that thought feel? Did it feel empowering, like I'm superhuman, or did it feel like a knock, like Idon't fit?SPEAKER AIt felt extremely empowering because I got to believe that I'm this special species with special powersthat can survive things that other people can't. But it also felt very lonely because I was the only one weconsidered.SPEAKER CThe point where you were in real estate with your dad and there was this big the real estate crash, andyou went bankrupt, and that was the moment where you kind of had to step up. Was that also themoment where what I'm calling the emotional callous kind of became evident as a problem, something toget past?SPEAKER AIt became evident slightly before that, but I didn't try to handle it until that happened with my father. So Ijust kind of ignored it. It became evident in my first business when I started a software company and thecompany went under. But one of the things I did wrong was had no emotional bond with any of myemployees. When things got hard, they just quit. And I was astonished. It was a huge surprise.SPEAKER CI'm wondering under which conditions they quit. Like, were you not able to pay them anymore? Was thecompany, like, truly going under and they were looking for other conditions? Were you trying to dosomething that they felt was too risky or too big?SPEAKER AWhen it got down to, we have three months of runway and no certain way of extending it, that's when theyquit. So they didn't wait until the end. As soon as it became clear that there was going to be an end, theyquit.SPEAKER CAnd that pissed you off?SPEAKER AYeah, immensely. It sent me into a depression because I felt abandoned at the time. I don't know if Iwould have used those words. I didn't even know what words to use for my emotions back then. I knew Iwas in pain, I knew it hurt, and I knew I was angry, but I felt abandoned. I felt like I gave this everything Ihad, and you didn't.SPEAKER CSo you thought you could pull it out, but you didn't. Then. Have the staff.SPEAKER AYeah. And when they left, that was the end. I couldn't do it by myself. I felt betrayed. And the rational partof me also recognized that the reason why they left is because they don't believe in you.SPEAKER CDoes it still seem that way today? Because here's where I'm going with this. So since we're looking at thisas kind of your journey was this particular thing, this is what has changed most. And there are other actmarkers that get further in. So if you look back and this was a moment where you said that your lack ofemotional understanding and attachment and bond to these people was one of the things that it soundslike caused this issue, and you're a different person now, and this was before your crisis point. Do you feeldifferently now? Do you feel like if you had the emotional maturity that you have today, that you wouldhave viewed this differently?SPEAKER AOh, yeah. I think, by the way, if I had had the emotional maturity that I had today, I would have quit andcalled them and tried to make it as painless as I could have for them as possible to find other work. Andnow I realize these are people who all had their own bills and their own families, and their families weremore important to them than my company. That's as it should have been. And at the time I viewed that asa betrayal. Now I view that as I was completely blind, completely blind. I didn't understand them at all.SPEAKER CBecause you used a word there that you don't use very often, especially a string of words. You said, Iwould have quit. And quitting is something that is exactly the opposite of what's going to happen in mostof this story. So I'm curious if I mean, the hero arc here is you learning emotional maturity and there's a lotmore to it than that, but that is kind of the core of it. And so I'm curious if your development on that arc,do you feel that it to any degree made you less tenacious and less determined because you would nowhave quit something that you were determined to do before?SPEAKER ASo if you had asked me this question even just five years ago, I would have given you a totally differentanswer. Now I recognize if you are a leader and there are people following you and you are facing a knowwhen situation where the outcome is not I mean, we're not saving the planet here. At the time, I wasbuilding a software company when the outcome is not more important than the lives of the people whoare following you, the mature and healthy thing to do is to surrender and live to fight another day and gostart another company and recruit the same people. And they will respect and love you because theyrealize that you put them ahead of your own ego.SPEAKER CSo what is your stance today? Visa vis, empathy, the stuff you were just talking about, and determination,is it that you are just as determined as ever when it is you and your consequences, but the equation, let'ssay, becomes bigger when there are other people involved.SPEAKER AAnd I think one of the hardest it even goes beyond that. It even applies to me personally. I recently leftthe United States after years of battling to get nurses, and it was me tapping out, me saying, I quit, I'mdone, next round. And what a younger me didn't understand, and some of my biggest mistakes have beenactually fighting for too long. There are times where the smartest thing you can do is recognize whensomething isn't working and change course. And it took me until probably 38, 39 years old to reallyunderstand that.SPEAKER COkay, let me do sort of a compare and contrast here. So everything you just said versus the stories thatyou've told, and maybe you should retell one of them about defeating something that didn't feel like it wasin your control. Pneumonia by force of sheer will. Now, I mean, I think I could suss out the difference, butI'd think I'd like to hear it from you, because that is a case where there is zero surrender, there's zerobargaining. It is everything. And then you're talking about the situation where you say, I'm going to tap outbecause the situation in the US isn't working with health care, so I'm going to go live to fight another day.SPEAKER AIt's about the stakes. Pneumonia was life and death. Tapping out would have been dying.SPEAKER CDid you feel like everything, looking back, did you treat everything like it was life and death before?SPEAKER AYes.SPEAKER CTo what age?SPEAKER AProbably until 38 years old.SPEAKER CAnd you're how old now?SPEAKER A40. About turned 41 later this month.SPEAKER CBut by the way, sidebar, how long were you supposed to live, according to your earliest doctors?SPEAKER ATwo years. Two.SPEAKER CAnd then they amended it once you passed two?SPEAKER AKind of sorta. They kind of sort of just shrugged their shoulders and said, I don't know.SPEAKER CDid you ever get another updated estimate?SPEAKER ANo, not that I'm aware of. It's possible my mother got one, but my mother was of a mindset at that time.She wouldn't have paid it any attention.SPEAKER CWell, that's something that we covered earlier, is that when you were too young to formally have any ofthese attitudes yourself, and it was your mother who instilled them in you, it was almost like herdetermination became your determination. It evolved and took root within you.SPEAKER AYeah, it definitely did. I got it from her.SPEAKER CIs she this determined about everything like as you are?SPEAKER AShe used to be. Now she's in her late sixty s, and she's tired. She doesn't want to fight anymore. And Idon't blame her. But yes, she used to be.SPEAKER CSo if you said that there was a time when you didn't feel human. And when we talked about this before inyour words, the the arc seemed to be the lesson that you had to learn seemed to be about learning to behuman, to not be so driven that it became callous and that it became reckless for other people. How longwhen did you start feeling human, assuming you do?SPEAKER AI do. It was around when I started dating. I was about 31. That's when I really confronted it, had.SPEAKER CIt just built to the point where you couldn't ignore it anymore. And there were things that were falling apartbecause you were so strong about everything.SPEAKER AI'd learned to pretend and manipulate not in a destructive way. I was never trying to hurt anyone, but I'dgotten very good at manipulating people. I was a great salesperson. And that's one thing. Two thingshappened. I started getting around other successful entrepreneurs and seeing and hearing about theirown journey, which the whole thing about not feeling human actually happens in a lot of entrepreneurs.Being around other entrepreneurs was the first time I didn't feel alone.SPEAKER CAnd then you saw from them some of the same lessons that you needed to learn.SPEAKER AI realized that there were lessons at the time. In the beginning, I didn't know what they were, but I knewconsciously that there were things I needed to learn and that other people had already learned them. Andseeing that gave me a desire to learn them as well because there.SPEAKER CWere benefits that they were having from those things or lack of obstructions that they were havingbecause of those lessons.SPEAKER ABecause they'd learned they were immensely happier and more fulfilled and calmer, more at peace than Iwas. And I wanted that when I was.SPEAKER CListening back to our Last Call and there's the section where you talked about the children of the light andthe children of the dark and you were born in the dark where there were monsters. It's this wonderfulsegment that we should probably pull that segment. It's wonderful and share it somewhere. So when Iwas listening to that, we've been considering now, obviously just loosely, but we kind of liked the feel ofDavid Goggins's book Can't Hurt Me, not Can't Help Me, as I wrote by mistake in a blog post, we'd beenconsidering that to be sort of, I would say, a rough parallel. And so I'm listening to that book at the sametime as on and off with when listening back to ours. And I had this idea that I want to get your reaction toand it's almost intentionally simplistic, but I just want to hear what you think. So his journey for peoplewho don't know David Goggins wrote a book called Can't Hurt Me and he's a Navy Seal. And the wholething is about learning to be strong and hard, right? Like developing just this mental unbreakability to thepoint of obsession, really. And so I was thinking about how his story is about learning to be hard andlearning to be unbreakable. But interestingly, the real true heart of your story to some degree feels like it'sthe opposite. It's learning not to be so hard, learning to be just a little soft. What do you think about that?SPEAKER AI was born like David Goggins. That's who I was as a kid.SPEAKER CSo you've got a Benjamin Button situation going with the David Goggins in some.SPEAKER AWay, but also so I don't know David Yogans. I've never talked to him. But when I watch interviews withhim, I see a man that's in the same prison I used to be in.SPEAKER CIn terms of being so hard and determined. That maybe less relatable.SPEAKER AAnd at the very level I know about him, I think he's had like a whole bunch of wives, a whole bunch offailed relationships. So that's evidence to me that something is wrong.SPEAKER CSo you like that idea of that you've kind of been ungogging yourself, that that is kind of your journey?SPEAKER AI'm still just as strong, but I'm less alone.SPEAKER CHow do you square those two things, John? Because I think a lot of people would say that they are tosome degree warring for space. That single minded determination that I am right. Everyone else is wrong,at least about certain things. I'm the smartest guy in the room. I'm going to get through this with sheerwill. And you're squaring that with this desire to connect and have empathy. That requires that you backaway from.SPEAKER AThat a little bit.SPEAKER CSo how did they find peace within you?SPEAKER AAll entrepreneurs are that way. One of my mentors, and now a dear friend, is named Alex Sharfin. He's avery successful CEO. He's now in his fifty s, I think. And Alex has a book where he talks about theentrepreneurial personality type. And it's not just psychological. It's not at all just psychological dribble.It's actually an investigation into the history of entrepreneurship. And he draws fairly solid connections tothe hunter gatherers of old that if you were a hunter, your job was to hunt, to attack, to kill, to be strongfor your tribe, but you were still a part of a tribe. That's the way I resolve it, yeah.SPEAKER CBecause you said that you kind of related to the children of Sparta legends, where they were made toughjust through being beaten and cruelty to some degree of emotional alienation. Certainly. Is that a fairparallel because they were still part of Sparta? Because I don't know. The only parts of Sparta that I'veseen in any detail are from 300. Right. I haven't studied it, but it doesn't seem to me a happy life even ifyou're part of Sparta. So is that a fair comparison or am I missing nuance?SPEAKER AIt gives your life meaning, it gives your suffering meaning. And you realize, by the way, I still think ofmyself as different from a non entrepreneur or from a non hunter. My real, all of my friends areentrepreneurs on some level, and it's because who I feel close to. But I view other people now as not adifferent species, but people with a different role to play.SPEAKER BOkay, everybody, just Johnny here again. We're doing this episode of this podcast as a pilot. There's nopoint in us continuing to record all of our sessions if people aren't interested, if people aren't listening. Soplease, if you are listening and you're listening on a directory, itunes or Spotify or anything like that, makesure you subscribe and you can rate or leave comments. Please do that. That makes a huge difference. Ifyou just click and give us five star review, hopefully, or if you leave us a review that would really help. Youcan also contact us directly. You can get John's team at [email protected]. Those emails will berouted to him, but John said the easiest way to get a hold of him is actually on Twitter. So that is just atJohnmarrow without the Hjonmorrowi am not on any social media whatsoever. Please visit my website. It'sJohnnybtruant.com, and I do have the H-J-O-H-N-N-Y-B-T-R-U-A-N-T. Subscribe to the site. That willkeep you maximally in the loop, but then please respond to anything in there and let me know, give mesome feedback, let me know if you liked this, if you want me to ask other things, if you have questions forJohn, any of that can come to my website. There's even a post near the top called The Impossible Manthat's all about this project. You can leave comments on that. You can email me at johnny at johnny.Btruant.com. Thanks so much and hopefully talk to you next time. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnnybtruant.substack.com