The Blunder Years

I think we all love us some rebound or rebuild stories -- we want it for your own lives, for our friends, and for our family. When something bad happens to someone, or they seem kicked in the mouth by life, we want to see them rise up and succeed. That’s a legitimately cool aspect of the human condition, I’d argue. I’d even say some of the narrative about Steve Jobs that makes his story resonate is that he got pushed out of Apple, came back, and made it one of the most valuable companies in the world for a time. The rebound aspect of the story is a big part of it.

That’s actually not a bad segue, because the guest on Episode 4 is Sid Clevinger. He actually lives in Dallas and I live in Fort Worth, but I didn’t know that when I started taping it … so I was sitting in a sparsely-populated co-working space about 40 miles from him when we taped. Anyway, Sid is an entrepreneur and a lead generation machine. We talk a little bit about that stuff -- he definitely loves him some entrepreneurs like Tony Robbins, Branson, Jobs, Gates, etc. But there’s a lot more human to this story; Sid had a rough first marriage and lost big in a business deal about three years ago. He can actually remember the taste of gunpowder in his mouth as a gun was perched there, and now he’s clearing 60K some months. It’s a nice come-up story and instead of framing it just around Steve Jobs or Richard Branson or Gary Vee or putting the entrepreneurial Instagram quote panels on a pedestal, we look at the human elements involved -- how relationships and your brain’s framework really can drive you from a low place to a successful place. Hope you enjoy.

A couple of years ago, I was volunteering at this public school in north Texas. It was not a good, high-performing elementary school, but through a series of connections, former President Bush -- W, not HW -- came to visit. I was never a big “W” fan because I grew up pretty liberal, but he was impressive on this visit. He didn’t understand the over-focus on lines in the hallway. I think someone even used the term “school to prison pipeline” while he was there. He had questions about the effectiveness of the curriculum. It’s all kind of ironic in some ways because No Child Left Behind was under his administration.

This all speaks broadly to the idea of “the system’ -- put that in quotes for a reason -- and how it benefits different people in different ways. Is this quote-unquote “system” broken? Perhaps. But to hear entrepreneur Ryan Narus tell it, it’s not so much “broken” as “evolved,” and that does present some new opportunities.

This is a relatively short convo of maybe 23-25 minutes, but there’s a lot of value in it around not playing the victim -- something I am often guilty of -- and how easily you can wake up in your 30s and think “Damn, I have no friends.” I’ve woken up many a morning in my 30s and felt that way. I’m actually currently using antidepressants in part because of that, which will be a topic for a future episode.

I’m admittedly probably a weird person, and I also admittedly have had a lot of different conversations in bars over the years with both genders. It’s weird because -- and obviously this varies by person -- normally when you’re a teenage boy, as I was about two decades ago, young boys talk about sex all the time. I’m sure young girls do too but I wasn’t privy to those conversations at that time, being a fat, awkward adolescent. But as dudes get older, potentially out of a focus on work or respect for their partner, they tend to discuss sex less, and women tend to discuss it a little bit more -- which is cool, but broadly I feel like no one is having really transparent discussions on the topic, and that’s problematic.

I met Mollie Bentley, who is the guest on this episode, via Twitter. We became friends quickly and we would periodically talk about sex and relationships. She’s been with her husband about 27 years and they have two kids. There’s a big sitcom-driven concept that sex is dead inside long-term relationships, and especially after kids. I know people for whom that’s true. I know people for whom that’s exactly the opposite. Mollie and I talk a lot about that near the middle to the back part of this episode.

You’ll also get thoughts into miscarriages, the role of social media in our world, sex as a habit, the weird work and personal lines that we draw around ourselves, and the big difference between how we grow up and how we’re expected to move through adulthood. The audio on this episode is pretty strong but around the ¾ mark of it, my dog was pacing around and fidgeting, so I had to take him out … you might hear some elevator pings as a result. My bad. 

I came up with the idea for this podcast at a weird spot in my life, give or take. I’ve been mostly freelance since about November 2015, but I’ve had some bigger contracts or close to full-time engagements in that span that helped with the consistency of bill-paying and life-living. I had one of those from September 2018 until May 2019, and I lost it right around Memorial Day at the beginning of this summer. Since then I’ve been a mix of hustling and adrift. In this episode, the first of The Blunder Years podcast, David Wolinsky is going to call this “existential adriftness.” A lot of males go through it -- and women too -- and it’s not commonly discussed as much as it should be. That was part of the reason I set out to even do this podcast. I’m probably not going to make much money off it, although down the road, let’s hope. But I hope you’ll see it as a series of interesting conversations about all the things that come into -- and out of -- our lives as we grow up and find ourselves.

In this conversation, you’ll hear about sitting in bathtubs drinking wine, getting free drinks at airport bars, golden retrievers wearing dress shirts, the two paths of life for a man over age 32, old man Improv, cricket emojis on lead generation efforts, whether work-life balance really exists, and whether your 30s are the period where you start to think you deserve more.

Before we get going with original conversational episodes about your life experiences from ages 25 to 45, this is a primer on what to expect from this podcast.