# Episode 40 - The Millennials - Craig Salazar - The Steph and Craig Show

- Podcast: GenX Adulting Podcast
- Published: 2025-07-18T03:00:00.000Z
- Audio: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2398379/episodes/17524394-episode-40-the-millennials-craig-salazar-the-steph-and-craig-show.mp3
- Page: https://genxadultingpodcast.com/transcripts/podcasts/genx-adulting-podcast/episodes/episode-40
- Source: https://genxadultingpodcast.com/episodes/genxadultingpodcastepisode40.html
- People: Brian Barker (host), Nicole Barker (host), Craig Salazar (guest)
- Topics: The Millennials

## Summary

In Episode 40 of The Steph and Craig Show, Craig Salazar discusses his unique position as a 'Zenial'—a bridge between Gen X and Millennials. He shares insights from his upbringing in a small Utah town, his experiences with family dynamics, and the challenges of navigating adulthood, including relationships, parenthood, and career changes.

## Key takeaways

- Craig identifies as a 'Zenial,' bridging the gap between Gen X and Millennials.
- He grew up in a small town in Utah, which shaped his childhood experiences.
- Craig's parents had a tumultuous marriage, leading to their divorce when he was 14.
- He became a stay-at-home dad, gaining a new appreciation for parenting.
- Craig worked as a corrections officer and later as a police officer, facing the challenges of law enforcement.
- His experiences with relationships and family dynamics have influenced his perspective on life.

## FAQ

### What is a 'Zenial'?

A 'Zenial' refers to individuals born on the cusp between Generation X and Millennials, often feeling a connection to both generations.

### How did Craig's upbringing influence his adult life?

Craig's upbringing in a small Utah town and his parents' tumultuous marriage shaped his views on relationships, parenting, and personal responsibility.

### What career paths did Craig explore?

Craig worked as a corrections officer and later transitioned to being a police officer, which provided him with unique insights into law enforcement.

### What challenges did Craig face as a stay-at-home dad?

Craig faced the challenge of balancing his identity as a stay-at-home dad while also seeking fulfillment and connection outside of parenting.

### How did Craig's family dynamics impact his relationships?

Craig's experiences with his parents' divorce and his role as a caregiver influenced his approach to relationships and parenting in his adult life.


## Referenced links

- [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6O69TpPjuW8)
- [Listen on Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-40-the-millennials-craig-salazar-the-steph/id1764838823?i=1000717836409)
- [Listen on Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/0TqmeBZb8bSFDYWeAZmXY8)
- [Listen on Buzzsprout](https://www.buzzsprout.com/2398379/episodes/17524394-episode-40-the-millennials-craig-salazar-the-steph-and-craig-show)

## Transcript

Welcome to GenX Adulting and today we have Craig Salazar with us, the producer and co-host of the Steph and Craig show.
Welcome, Craig.
Hey guys, welcome.
I don't know why I said welcome.
Hello.
uh a podcast host, so it's a habit.
It's habit.
We're thrilled to have you here.
And the first question we always ask is what year were you born?
I was born in 1981 and it was so funny.
It was so funny that you text me right before today because that was the thing that I had been thinking about all of this week where it was like, damn it.
I because I know that I've seen like the whole when we come into the space of like Gen X millennial and the whole nine yards, right?
There's always like a slight opinion based off of is it these years or is it these years?
When does it really start?
When does it really end?
So I got super in my head about it.
And when you text me today, I was like, shit.
They're going to tell me I can't come out the podcast because I'm a millennial.
we're a generational podcast.
So we've had Gen Z, Millennial, Gen X and Boomers on.
So it doesn't matter.
And you're actually a Zenial.
you're the crossover, but you guys kind of bridge the Gen X world and the Millennial world.
Yeah, I feel like this is the way that I was thinking about it, where it was like, I feel like I'm the younger brother of the Gen X generation, and I'm the oldest brother of the
Millennials.
Like, I've got so much wisdom for Millennials.
And then I'm stuck in this place of like, there's a part of me that is learning from Gen X, but then also kind of like, fuck you guys, because they feel like older brother energy
to me.
100 % because I Xennials you're an elder millennial.
You're the eldest millennial because Gen X I guess officially stops at 1980 and you're 1981.
But I know that siblings that were born in 80 81 82 83 they grew up with Gen X older siblings and so a lot of them feel like their childhood was a Gen X childhood because they
were doing they were going off with their older siblings and doing all the things.
And you just described it perfectly.
You guys are the younger siblings of Gen X, but you're the older siblings of the millennials.
And so, you know, sometimes you jive with Gen X and sometimes you're like, no, you know, I'm with the millennials.
So now would you say your childhood?
Well, first, where were you born?
I was born in Tooele, Utah, which is it's out west.
So if you're familiar with Utah and where Salt Lake City is, it's just out west.
It's on the other side of the mountain range from Salt Lake City.
So we were about 45 minutes outside of Salt Lake.
I was born in Tooele, which was the biggest uh city on that side of the mountain.
But I actually grew up in Grantsville, which is a smaller town just outside of Tooele.
So it was a real small town.
I think.
I mean, I don't even know what the population was growing up.
It was under 10,000.
I had just over like 100 kids in my graduating class.
oh
your parents from there?
My mom was, that was where my mom was born and raised.
My dad's from California.
So he was, what's that?
Yeah, he was in the Air Force.
And so my mom worked at essentially like a truck stop diner.
And um he worked at this military base that was out in the West Desert of Utah.
And um they just happened to meet there.
It's like a movie almost.
It was definitely, I could see it through the lens of a movie for sure.
Yeah, yeah.
Beautiful out there.
Yeah, it's absolutely you grew up in God's country.
There's no question.
It's gorgeous out there.
Yeah, Utah is really, really beautiful.
That's one thing.
When we moved to Tennessee, which was just a couple of years back, we've been in Tennessee now for almost three years.
we that's one of I mean, on top of our kids, right, we still have grown all of our adult daughters are in Utah.
And obviously, we miss them first and foremost.
But I think a close second is just how beautiful it was.
And that was something that, uh you know, after you're away for a long time, you really come to appreciate it.
Yeah, I can understand that.
I'm from Oregon and I didn't realize how beautiful the Pacific Northwest was.
I really didn't until I left.
And then I was like, I grew up in a really beautiful part of the country.
I also didn't realize how gray it was where I grew up until I left.
And so I think the challenge for me is I don't think I could go back to the grayness again once you get out of that.
But Utah is not like that.
You're not gray like.
Yeah, no, it's hot and dry.
It's very much a desert state.
um Even though we have tons of snow in the winter and we've got beautiful mountains and everything like that, but the vast majority of the state's a desert.
And so it's real dry and arid.
So we don't get a ton of rain, but I mean, amazing sunsets, beautiful mountains.
Do know what I mean?
Do you know why they decided to stay there and not go back to California?
Where your dad's from?
I think what happened, because when they got, when they met, immediately after getting married, they, because he was in the Air Force and he got deployed to the Philippines.
It was right at the end of the Vietnam War.
And so they were in the Philippines for two years right after they got married.
And my oldest brother, so I've got two older brothers.
My oldest brother was born in 76 and then the middle brother was 78 and then I was an 81.
So my oldest brother was actually conceived in the Philippines.
And I don't actually know why they chose to come back to Grantsville.
Actually, it was probably because my dad got stationed at that same military base.
That's what it was.
Because that was as soon as you asked the question, I'm like, I don't actually know why.
Because that was a big question growing up.
I'm like, why the hell are we here?
We would go to California all the time for holidays.
My dad's family's there.
So I've got aunts and uncles in California.
growing up, we went there all the time.
And it was always just like, are we doing?
this is why we don't understand why.
Because we would go to California and it was like, my gosh, this is the life.
This is where we need to be living.
What part of California?
It was Southern California.
So he was born and raised in Carson.
And uh a lot of our family is still down in like Torrance, but my grandparents lived up in Central Coast.
So up in this town called Napomo, which is kind of in between Santa Maria, California and Pismo Beach.
That's a really, really beautiful area of California.
So that was where we spent the majority of our childhood when we would go out there.
was up there in Napoma in that area of California.
But we would come and go and you'd go to Los Angeles to see aunts and uncles and go to Disneyland and then you drive up the coast to see grandparents.
And we've done that trip.
Yeah, yeah, we've done that trip a ton with our kids too.
Essentially just that same thing going and spending as much time as we can in California wondering why the hell did we settle in Utah?
Would you drive from Utah to California?
That's a nice drive.
did that.
mean, that's how I grew up going to California uh was in a Volkswagen bug and not a bug, a big VW van.
And uh we basically, you know, I recreated my childhood, except it was a red Dodge caravan.
So we had a minivan that we would cram all of our kids in and drive to California back and forth.
That is very cool.
Do you know what year the bus was that your parents had?
my gosh, I want to say it was in the 70s, like late 70s, I feel like.
No, it wasn't the, it wasn't the camper.
was, um.
transport are probably with the multiple rows.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We had the seats that we could remove and take out, but it was like not the easy, you know, it was a pain in the butt, but you could remove them.
um But it was two bench seats and then the two front seats.
It was a stick shift.
Like I remember growing up, you know, driving and getting to shift into third gear and getting to shift into fourth gear.
And that was a lot of how I learned how to drive was sitting in the passenger seat, learning how to win to shift and listening to the engine.
So when it came time to actually get behind the wheel and start driving, it was super easy for me.
What color was it?
Okay.
was white and it had a, they called it Big Bug.
So the license plate was Big Bug.
That's very cool.
You were about to tell.
Well, we actually have a 1976 camper van VW, the pop top one.
It's cool.
Yeah, it's in our garage.
Yeah.
Currently have the motor out, but yeah, we'll get it back.
The one thing about owning a Volkswagen is you learn how to work on a Volkswagen.
You need to become a mechanic.
100%.
Yeah.
So you have two siblings and that explains why you prob they're older than you.
Why you probably experienced a lot of a Gen X childhood.
So did you do a lot of the stuff the Gen Xers talk about drinking out of the garden hose and leaving in the morning and not having to come back till the lights came on and all
that.
was, I think a big chunk of, one of the things that I like, we're joking about, you know, why didn't we move to California?
Which you would have moved to California.
But one of the things that was really, really wonderful about growing up in that small town was it basically was just my backyard.
And so we were all over town all the time, especially like that sweet spot between like middle school and high school.
I mean, we're out riding bikes nonstop all day long.
Um, do you know what I mean?
Leaving the house in the morning and all of my friends lived all over town.
And so that's how we had to get to wherever we wanted to go because our parents weren't home to give us rides to our friend's house.
So it was like, I had to wake up and I, some of my best friends lived all the way on the other side of town, which I mean, in a car, it's a five minute drive, right?
But me on my old mountain bike, I'm like, I had to pack water.
had to make sure I was prepared.
It was going to be this journey to get to the other side of town.
Yeah.
Were you at least in a valley?
So it's kind of flat, maybe a little bit of a slope,
Yeah, no, very much.
Yeah, yeah.
was, uh, Grantsville is positioned between two big mountain ranges.
And so it's the Ochre mountain ranges, which are the ones that are on the Salt Lake side.
And then the Stansberry mountains, which are on the west side of the valley.
And Grantsville is kind of up against the Stansberries and Tualas up against the Ochres.
So it's a nice little flat valley there surrounded by these beautiful mountains.
And we spent tons of time up in the mountains.
Um, just.
you know, doing all the wonderful things that you do as a kid up in the mountains.
Did you guys get snow then there in the valley in the winter?
So it's probably like a Hallmark movie.
I picture a Hallmark movie.
You're tout.
There's really this is the funny thing too, is it's like there's so many different versions of my childhood, right?
I can totally see it through the lens of the Hallmark movie.
Like there was even a uh like a candy stop kind of ice cream parlor old building called the Bluebird on Main Street right across from the elementary school that we would go to.
And like that's where you could get penny candy.
And like it used to be a real thriving kind of like um
Friday night hangout place where you'd stop and get ice cream and soda shop kind of vibe.
But that was like back in the day.
And now it was like a rundown kind of cool still place where you'd go and find the weirdest things, you know.
We had a lot of places like that.
So how lucky for your mom, I guess, that your dad got stationed there because then she could stay near her family.
Did that just happen or did they request that, do you think?
I think it just happened.
don't think that it was, I mean, they could have, I don't know for sure.
But my thought was he got stationed there and then got deployed to Philippines and then came back to where he was stationed.
And that's where he worked his entire career.
So he worked at that same military base my whole entire life.
spent, think he retired after like 35 years or something.
And it was kind of a weird
dynamic too, because it was it was about 45 minutes an hour outside of town.
Just like as soon as you start heading further west from Grantsville on I-80, eventually you get to Nevada and in between Grantsville and Nevada, there's nothing that's where the
uh Bonneville salt flats are.
So all of the stuff that happens out there, I mean, it's it's just right outside of Grantsville.
And but that military base that he worked at was out in the middle of nowhere.
So
he would be stationed there and stationed isn't the right word, but his shift would be like three days on and three days off.
And so he would be gone for three or four days, come home for a few days and then go back to work.
So it was very much this bizarre way of living where he wasn't home for half of the week.
And then when he was home, do you know what I mean?
was just very, we lived completely different lives when he was at work versus when he was home.
It's probably very similar to when one of the spouses travels.
So there's a life of, you know, where it's one way when they're gone and then when they come back, it's almost like the parent who's back is a novelty a little bit.
It's like, well, dad's here.
So, you know, we're going to everything's a little bit extra different or special or his way.
But, you know, then when he leaves again, you know, your mom could be like, OK.
We're going to have cereal for dinner.
Don't worry.
You know, it's like maybe even a little, I don't know.
don't know if that's how it was.
less structured or maybe, I don't know.
so funny that you mentioned all of that.
That's exactly how it was.
we, like I could never have my friend sleep over if my dad was going to be home from work.
So all the things that we wanted to do and could do happened when he was gone, when he was at work.
Right.
And I mean, that was consistent throughout my entire childhood up until they got divorced.
They got divorced when I was 14, but the way that you describe it as, it's like when a parent travels.
So I had a job from, trying to think when I started, it was like 2016, up until just last year, where I worked for this company called DreamPod that manufactures float tanks.
And a big part of that job was me traveling.
So there was like four or five years when I was just on the road two or three times a month, just gone, traveling, traveling, traveling, traveling, traveling.
So I loved that you highlighted it for me, because I had never put those two pieces together where...
I'm constantly seeing this like how I was joking about, uh you know, I recreated my childhood by driving my kids to California in a minivan and somehow I recreated my
childhood by being the dad that was gone where, you know, not there half the week and everything is one way and then dad comes home and we got to hurry up.
Because when I was a kid, it was like, shit, Saturday morning, we had to hurry up and get up and vacuum and fold clothes and take out the garbage and.
Rush, rush, rush as fast as we could before he pulled into the driveway.
Yeah, it's almost like you're having a party and the parents are on their way home.
It's like, clean everything up, hurry up.
Being in the Air Force, was he a pretty strict kind of ruled guy?
Not really.
uh wasn't, you know, he just, truthfully, he wasn't really around very much.
When he was home, he wasn't really present.
uh He, there was a certain point where it was just a lot of disconnect.
I don't have a ton of memories involving him.
So he wasn't really actively involved in my day-to-day life.
It was more or less that he was just strict and he was, you know,
an asshole and so we kind of just stayed out of his way as much as we could.
But it also wasn't like he, like we didn't have to, you know, I didn't feel like I was under some strict controlling, although it sounds like it as I'm describing it.
But what you're saying, he was physically there, but mentally elsewhere, probably.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it was more just kind of like stay out of his way, you know, and he, probably viewed that time home as his reprieve as opposed to maybe his time to connect with his children.
Yeah.
There's two different ways to look at it.
Right.
So now was your mom a stay at home mom?
She was up until I got into school.
Once I got into school, think even kindergarten, definitely first grade, then she started working outside of the home.
But up until that point, she was a stay at home mom and she babysat.
So my older brothers eventually started going to school.
then suddenly I was like, because those were my playmates, those were my brothers, right?
That's who I'm hanging out with every day.
she would babysit upwards of like eight, 10, 12 kids in the house.
those became the kids that I hung out with and became my playmates up until I went to school.
almost like she ran a daycare out of her home a little bit.
Yeah.
And then when she went to work, what did she do?
She did a bunch of different things.
She worked at a truck stop uh for a short time at the gas station.
She was just working part-time jobs, I think, in the evenings and when she could get them.
then for a good chunk of time, we were working at the school that I went to, the elementary school.
We lived right down the street from the elementary school.
And so, I mean, it was less than a five-minute walk.
was like literally next, yeah, right next to the elementary school.
So.
We walked back and forth to the school all the time, obviously.
And at some point, I'm trying to remember how old I was.
I was still in elementary school.
So was probably like my fourth grade year.
I was 10 years old or nine years old right before I went into middle school.
Uh, she started being a janitor at the school.
So after school, I would have to stay and then help clean the school and did that up and through.
I think probably like fifth or sixth grade, I would get done in a middle school and then have to walk down.
to the elementary school to help clean up.
So we did that for a while, but then she eventually started working for Head Start.
And once she got that, she started out as not a volunteer teacher, like an assistant teacher.
then just, that's been her career path.
She started at Head Start at the very bottom level and then eventually worked her way up into the corporate side of it, the more administrative side of it all.
That's great.
Now in elementary school, were you in, was there sports or were you into art or music?
Like what did your interest, any interest show up when you were in elementary school?
I don't think so.
um was, you know, I was definitely athletic.
I played um baseball growing up.
We were a baseball family.
Coming from California, my dad's favorite team was the Dodgers.
So that was just imprinted upon birth that that was going to be your favorite team.
And so I grew up playing baseball.
um We weren't allowed to play football, which was a big uh point of contention.
At some point along the way, my parents had some like knee doctor or somebody, I don't know, some mythical person told them, don't let your sons play football.
So they set this rule that we couldn't play football, which there's a funny story about, because eventually I, I got to be the rule breaker for all these hard and fast rules that
were set growing up being the youngest, right?
So that was a really fun thing.
But during that time period in middle or in elementary school, yeah, I'm really, um,
I'm playing baseball.
I'm very much wanting to be outside.
It was very difficult for me to kind of sit and throughout my entire schooling, it was like, can't just sit and do whatever it is that they're wanting me to do.
I was always distracting myself either through my imagination and kind of just daydreaming and dissociating or fighting a lot.
A lot of my friends, I've got like...
One of my long time, like actually my longest friend that we became friends in first grade because we fought so much at recess that our teacher eventually kept us inside from recess
and made us sit in the classroom.
And she's like, this has to stop.
You guys need to be friends now.
And we ended up becoming friends by playing.
I don't know if you remember the old computer game cricket where it was this like, it doesn't matter, but yeah.
that game.
don't either, yeah.
No.
Maybe if you want to take 30 seconds to describe it, I might know.
Yeah, yeah.
What's cricket?
Oh, Oh, Frogger.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, we totally know Frogger.
that we played that, you know, the old floppy disks that was cricket instead of Frogger, but it was the same game.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
like physically fighting on recess or just arguing?
Really?
big part of what shaped my childhood was violence.
so it was
a fighter then with just this kid or other kids?
No, like I grew up with, because my brothers and I would fight all the time.
And so was very much a violent house in that regards where we were constantly fighting.
I mean, it's, you know, I tried to, I've tried to sugarcoat it over the years and look at it through so many different lenses.
And it's just what it is, what it is.
I mean, we grow up beating the shit out of each other and destroying our house and.
Was it them picking on you and you eventually hitting an age where you're like, fuck this, and you fought back, and you got big enough where you could defend yourself?
Or was it really like, you're an asshole, we're going?
That type of
Yeah, it was very much them picking on me.
But that point of like getting to the age where I could fight back, like I always fought back.
I was always the meanest.
they would have to break me.
There's a story that um when I say I tell, I don't like telling it because it's a shitty memory.
But I was always wanting to play with them, right?
They're my older brothers.
were my idols.
I always wanted to play.
No matter what they were doing, I would want to do it.
I just want to hang out with you guys.
I just want to spend time with you.
Everything that you do is so amazing and so incredible, right?
So just want to hang out with my older brothers.
But there was just enough of an age gap between like they were really close.
They were only two years apart.
And then I was kind of on this back end.
So my oldest brother, em he'll be what is he four years, five years.
He's about four and a half years, five years older than me.
um So there's enough of a gap there that, you know, he's not interested in anything I'm doing.
and I'm only a hindrance to what he's doing.
So that's a lot of times what it was, was I was just in the way of whatever it was that they were trying to do.
Like they would have to dumb down stuff for me.
So like playing to Trivial Pursuit or something, they would use to make up questions for me rather than ask me the actual questions on the card.
So, and on top of all of that, we were always beating the shit out of each other.
It was always hitting each other with stuff and...
It was never like, let's stand up and punch each other in the face and throw punches.
But it was like, let's rustle.
Let's punch each other in the stomach.
And I mean, I used to tackle my brother and just pound away on his back trying to get him to stop.
So it was a lot of that.
And I was the story I was going to tell.
Sorry.
It was uh like the level for with which I would go to so that I could hang out with them.
Right.
I just wanted to hang out with them.
Yeah.
so my dad was, like I said, he was in the Air Force, but he was essentially military police.
And so he had handcuffs.
So we got my dad's handcuffs.
And I told them, I'm like, you can handcuff me.
You can tie me up.
And I'm going to be able to escape.
Like I wanted to impress them.
At the time, I'm like, and not at the time, I still am.
But at the time, I'm like super into magic and David Copperfield and Harry Houdini.
And I'm like, I'm to be able to get out of this.
So those sons of bitches handcuffed me behind my back and then they put all of these blankets on top of me.
So I'm covered in blankets and then they use this rope and tied around my body on the outside.
And then they leave me in the room and turn the light off and I'm laying there handcuffed, strapped in thinking like if I can get out, they're going to be so like I'm going to amaze
them if I can get out of this.
Like if I can get out of this, they're going to be like so like
you know, that's going to impress them so much if I can get out of this.
And I was so confident that I was going to be able to do it.
And I couldn't do it.
And then it got to the point where it was like, I think I'd literally passed out because it's like this phase, the spoggy memory where I remember being in the blanket, just like
pouring sweat and so hot and so like, I just couldn't move.
And I eventually like fell down.
And the next thing I remember was feeling the rush of like
cool air when my mom was pulling the blanket off of me.
And so at some point, I think I passed out.
I don't know for sure if I did, but she comes into the room and gets me untied.
But she was so pissed off when she found me that she like lost her shit and went after my brothers.
And then I didn't know what was going on.
So I end up like hiding in my room.
And yeah, it was just a crazy experience.
the whole purpose, like the whole
impetus for all of it was like, I just want to hang out with my brothers.
Yeah, and that's result.
that's crazy?
Like as you were telling that story, I was claustrophobic and I had anxiety because that's just all, my gosh, I can't even imagine.
Yeah, that would be terrible.
The handcuffs alone.
Yeah.
It's crazy.
Do you think that the physical, the way the physical outlet for you guys um was because of the disconnect from your dad, like not having that connection with a father figure in the
house?
Yeah, I think that was a huge component of it.
There's a lot of, like I see my childhood so completely different today than I've ever seen it before.
And a lot of that has come through healing and through trauma and being able to really reflect back and see.
When I say the truth of things, think that, you know, think truth is always relative to where you're at in life.
Like I would have said that I knew the truth of my childhood.
20 years ago, like I would have said, hey, this is what my childhood was, and I would have thought that's the truth of it.
And I think both things are true.
I think that was true.
I think I grew up in a way that I can see it through a lens that it was, you know, I had crazy brothers that used to be the shit out of me, it made me really tough.
I, you know, I never like, luckily I never had to really fight anybody because I, yeah, I don't know why, whether it was, it definitely wasn't because of them.
Like they weren't.
the kind of brothers that like had my back because they were too much older than me, right?
Anyways, I see the childhood through that lens.
And then as I've continued to heal, I see it through a completely different lens.
And there was a lot of shit going on in my house that wasn't being addressed and wasn't being talked about and wasn't being acknowledged and actually was being hidden and all
sorts of things like that.
So the level of like emotional repression.
has to have an outlet.
And I think that's a lot of what we as little boys were doing was feeling all of that stuff and not knowing how to express it, but knowing something was wrong.
So just off gassing almost into each other.
And then it just becomes this cycle and pattern of, do you know what I mean?
Where there's this level of trauma that's existing and happening that's not really being addressed and talked about, but it's manifesting in this way in the house.
Well, and I think that em for I know for Gen X men when they were kids and definitely for Xennial and elder millennial men, I'm sure the acceptable emotion to express was anger and
anything else, you know, um there was no one helped you guys define your emotions in any way like, well, you're feeling this way and this might be why no one got to the root of
anything.
And God forbid you guys cried.
um So I think.
that makes sense that I have a feeling that uh a large majority of Gen X and elder millennial men when they were kids did act out physically because it builds up.
And then the only outlet you have is that physical reaction or just being angry and edgy as a way of expressing emotions.
too.
You guys certainly had to have fed off of each other and especially the older two.
Right.
And then here's this younger one.
It's a perfect cocktail in many ways.
You gotta express your rage somehow or, you know, and it could start as a simple, my buddies, my best friends, he had an older brother and he used to pick on us, us cow bites,
press us down and hang loogies over our head and shit like that, right?
But then we got old enough and the two of us got old enough where we could take him and for a while there we couldn't, but then once we could, it ended.
Because we started doing that shit back to him.
Yeah.
No, I mean, what you're describing is, when did you, when did you, when did you kind of, I think maybe discover the new realization versus say 20 years ago and maybe that new
perspective on it?
I guess it's evolved, right?
But did you have an epiphany moment ever?
Yeah, very much an epiphany moment.
came in, it was after COVID.
The timeframe, like time isn't super important to me.
get super, you know, it's like, was this 2018, 2019?
I'm like, no, it was definitely after COVID.
But I think what happened was, I don't think what happened.
What happened was we started working with therapists, both Steph and I.
And it came because of...
I mean, the trajectory that leads up to this moment was almost like the catalyst for that was in 2015, right after we got married, I got fired.
At the time, I was a police officer and I got fired right after we got married in 2015.
So then that just like catapults the next five years of chaos to ensue after that.
It was really a stressful time in our relationship and in our life for so many different reasons.
So we start working with therapists and just after COVID and we happen to just like luck out and find the perfect therapists that worked so well with us.
You how sometimes it's hard, you know, not all therapists are for all, you know, you got to find the ones that connect with and I've had therapy off and on over the years, but
never like a real concerted amount of it.
Just uh some.
Boy, I don't even I'm trying to remember now.
I I had a little bit of couples therapy in my first marriage.
um And then I started seeing a therapist for a short time in my first marriage, but then after that, and that was in my 20s.
And so I start working with a therapist and eventually we do MDMA assisted therapy with these therapists.
And they came out to the house and we would take turns, both Steph and I, where...
um
because the therapists work in conjunction with each other too.
So Steph's therapist would come to the sessions when I did MDMA and my therapist would go to the sessions when Stephanie would do MDNA.
So we each had our own individual therapists, but they each kind of crossed back and forth.
And uh it was a really cool dynamic that ended up happening and created a huge amount of healing for both of us.
But that's what it was, was in that therapy during that time period.
It was over the course of a little over a year.
And at the same time of doing those sessions, we were also microdosing psilocybin.
And I think in conjunction with all of that, being able to really remember things and have trauma that was repressed for a very, very long time, I mean, up until that point, em
being able to reach in and be able to touch those places and see that stuff and start to put those pieces together.
And then it's just like the...
dominoes just kind of start falling down because you see your childhood through different lenses now because it's like, now it makes sense why, you know, this was the case.
It's kind of like fighting with my brothers.
That was kind of like uh a beginning point where I started to see things very, very differently.
I'm like, um why did we fight all the time?
know, truth is, I love my brothers.
I love my family.
I grew up in a really
beautiful little town with all these opportunities and grew up playing baseball.
Like there's a perspective of my childhood that's the sandlot.
I totally, you know what I mean?
Loved, it's like, that's what it was.
And there was this other thing that was also happening at the same time.
Have you ever spoken with them about it?
Have you guys revisited it?
The three of you?
No, I don't really have much of a relationship with either of them anymore at this point.
It's real sporadic.
Yeah.
right.
So now middle school, always say middle school.
us on track.
Yeah.
I want to dive into the whole, it's a journey that approach the psilocybin MDMA approach.
You're almost, I'm jumping ahead, but you're an advocate.
It sounds like, and not that it's controversial per se, but it's semi new maybe or unconventional.
but I do think there's a lot of value there.
Traditional medicine doesn't totally embrace it yet.
So I do want to dig into that.
100%.
Yeah, we'll go deeper into that for sure.
it's a big part of the journey for sure.
Yeah, yeah, it's cool.
I always say middle school sucks.
It sucks for the kids in it and it sucks for parents of middle school age children.
I hated it and all three of my kids had negative experiences.
So that's my perspective.
How was your middle school experience?
OK, so you're one of those.
There's there's there's definitely people.
Yeah.
OK.
when I, uh so for me it was fifth grade through eighth grade.
And during that time period is when I really solidified all of my core friends that I would continue, I still have those friends today.
So it was really that timeframe where it was like, that was the timeframe when I was riding my bike all over town, where it was, we were having sleepovers.
all weekend long, we were out in the middle of nowhere doing all the things that we weren't supposed to be doing.
Do you know what I mean?
Like that timeframe was so magical for me.
So it was a lot of Great, great years for me.
All of them.
Like there's, you know, there's so many stories in there of like, em yeah, there's a lot of stories during that timeframe, but it's all beautiful.
It's all good.
I really enjoyed it.
Yeah.
mobility, really.
Yeah.
that time period, so my parents got divorced when I was 14, which was that uh eighth grade to ninth grade years.
So going into high school, that was what I was dealing with uh as a freshman.
But leading up to that point, very much had autonomy, very much was in between, you know, after school, we would go home and my parents aren't home, my dad's gone at work.
So we know, you know, my dad's not home.
And he was usually home like on the weekends.
He wasn't really home during the week.
And my mom was working in the evening, so she wasn't going to be home.
So it's very much coming home, watching TV, making, you know, not really making anything.
We ate a ton of cereal.
uh That was the life.
And then if it wasn't that, it was doing the equivalent of that at my buddy's houses.
And I had so many different friends over town.
One of my best friends was right up the street in
He was in between my house and the middle school.
So oftentimes it was just going to his house and hanging out at his house and doing all of those kinds of No, Yeah, empty houses.
mean, should say, I'm trying to think like, yeah, the vast majority of my childhood, was like, you know, a mom might have been home for a few hours or something, but yeah, by and
large.
were you playing baseball still during that time?
Yes, during my middle school years, yeah, I switched from baseball to tennis when I went into high school because that core group of guys that I was growing up with in middle
school for whatever reason, well, not for whatever reason, one of them was in the tennis family.
There was this huge tennis family dynasty um in Grantsville.
So he was part of that lineage.
So he was going to play tennis in high school regardless.
And he had been playing tennis already.
And then everybody else kind of followed.
And it was like, I wanted to play baseball, guys.
I thought we were playing baseball.
And I ended up playing tennis throughout high school, which was a great experience as well.
But middle school, I was still playing baseball and, you know, like all stars.
And we took third place and stayed.
And it's like all the, I mean, that was just like, like that would be my stand by me years.
That's like the richest part of my childhood.
If I was going to ever, you know, write a book or make a movie of my childhood, it would definitely be that time period because there was so much fun stuff.
Yeah.
And then you said your parents got divorced.
Do you did you know that was coming?
Like it was, uh we knew that their relationship was pretty much non-existent.
Like for the most part, they didn't really have a functional marriage.
And when it finally came, like when my mom finally sat us down, she sat down all three of us boys and it was like, we're getting a divorce and we're like, it's about fucking time.
Like, why did you wait so long?
Do you know what I mean?
They just weren't in a...
you should have done this years ago.
Yeah.
yeah, it was kind of the thing where we didn't understand like, we have this life when he's not here that is this and then we have this life when he is here.
Like it makes a lot of sense.
Why don't we have this life all the time?
And, you know.
find that, um because for a lot of us Gen Xers, we were the first generation where parents were typically getting divorced.
I mean, there was divorce before that, but it was starting to become more, quote unquote, normal for us.
ah Did you find with your peers, was it an unusual situation that your parents were divorcing?
Were all your friends' parents still married or was everyone getting divorced?
No, it was a very, it was not common.
we also had the added, the community, the town that I grew up in was, when I say like predominant or the majority, like essentially all of the town is Mormon.
So it's a completely small Mormon town from, you know, in Utah.
And so that religion also colors everything, which means
people aren't getting divorced in that religion.
it's um not something that none of my other friends, its parents were getting divorced.
So was it considered fairly scandalous at the time?
I don't know for sure from the outside.
uh I think I was probably too, uh too involved in what I was experiencing from the inside of it to see if it was viewed that way from the outside.
We also weren't, we were always kind of on the outside of the community anyways, because my dad was not Mormon.
My mom was, and she had grown, my mom grew up in this town, so I knew everybody in the town or everybody knew me essentially.
So if I didn't know them, they know who I was.
was because I was my mom's boy, right?
As soon as they learned that you're a Salazar, oh, okay, now we know who you are.
Sorry, what were we talking about?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It was, we were on the outside of the community already because we weren't really part of the church.
We would go to church um in order to kind of meet the community aspect of it because we were really involved in scouting as well.
Like that was another big component to my childhood was the scouts and Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts and the whole nine yards.
And my parents were involved with it as well.
They were our leaders in scouting and involved with it pretty intensely.
um
So we were on the outside of the community because we stopped going to church when I was about nine or 10 years old.
And then um scouting kind of fell away as well when they got divorced.
So when they got divorced, was probably kind of like, people didn't do a head-to-head judgment necessarily because you guys weren't super involved in the community at that
time, probably.
So the scouting, when your parents were leaders, your dad, assume then that was when he was home and not at work.
But did all the scouting stuff happen whenever he was home?
Yes and no, like, cause my mom was our Cub Scout leaders.
So like we would have Cub Scouts at the house.
So like the, all the Cub Scouts would come to the house and my mom was the den leader of that group of Cub Scouts.
So, um, he's not around for that kind of stuff.
He would be around when we would have like the pack meetings and the group meetings and all the kind of council stuff.
And he was always involved with, uh,
more of the scouting from the backside, like the administration and the, em there's like adults that are involved in scouting that don't really have anything to do with.
Yeah, they're more like it's, you know, they're hanging out and planning whatever they do.
I don't know, he, he, he just was not involved with what we were actually doing.
He was involved, but he was involved with it at an adult level.
She was still, she was doing most of it.
Yeah.
Okay.
So how was it for you when they got divorced?
Did you stay living with, did you and your brother stay living with your mom and your dad moved out or what was the situation?
My oldest brother was already, let's see, if I was 14, he would have already been, he like, was already off to college.
I feel like it happened during the time period when he was, uh when he graduated and then he was going to college.
So he wasn't really an issue.
So it was just me and my other brother.
And it wasn't really an option.
uh It wasn't the, their relationship was really uh screwy and wacky.
And so
We didn't really m have a choice.
It was essentially, this is what happened.
And then my dad left and then we didn't really see him that much.
I didn't even know where he like lived or where he was staying.
He would come and get us sometimes after he'd get off of work.
Cause again, he's working at the same place, right?
And he lived somewhere outside of Grantsville somewhere, like I just assumed in Salt Lake or something like that.
But I didn't, we never actually went to his house until I was much older.
Okay.
so we never stayed with him.
There was no split custody.
He would come in sometimes and like snag us and take us to a movie or something like that, and then come drop us back off at the house or something like that.
So still lived at home.
um I'm 14.
My oldest brother, or Brian, my middle brother, he was a senior.
So he graduated.
And then I still had like, em yeah, the rest of those teenage years just at home with my mom.
I mean, typically for all three of you boys, those are rough ages for your parents to get divorced.
But it sounds like for you guys, it um maybe almost brought some peace to the situation.
Like it was kind of something you guys were waiting to have happen.
And when it finally did, not that it wasn't rough, but it was probably was almost like, like you were waiting for the other shoe to drop a little bit.
Is that an accurate description?
Yeah, think there was definitely the side of us that we were able to just go like, and take a deep breath.
And that definitely...
helped, think, for a lot of different reasons and a lot of different things.
But there was a bigger part of just not like having real understanding of why or what was going on.
Do you know what mean?
I don't know if like kids ever understand why their parents are getting divorced.
Having been through a divorce, I don't even know if I really understand, right?
I mean, sometimes it's really clear why people are getting divorced.
But the space is so convoluted that I don't think we had any understanding of why they were getting divorced.
And then
There was a part of me that still very much missed my dad and wanted my dad there and having him just kind of essentially disappear and not show up to anything.
Like there's, you know, all of my, all the stuff that I did throughout high school, uh, acting and plays and tennis and all of these different events and things like that.
He'd never showed up to any of them.
He just wasn't present for any of that stuff.
And so that, what's that?
What about holidays?
They would like.
I was gonna say they would split them, but we never celebrated uh holidays with him.
Yeah, so we always just did the same thing and then he would like come by in the mornings sometimes on his way home from work or something.
So your core person was your mom.
And is she still alive?
Are you still close with her?
No, I'm not.
Okay, we'll get to that.
What sounds to me more like your person or persons were your buddies, your friends.
Is that accurate?
Yeah, I mean, they definitely were what saved me, I think.
um
you're still friends with them now.
You definitely bonded with them through those years.
Yeah, we, I, you know, I spent more time at my, I tried to spend as much time as I could away from my home during that time period.
And em so it was, yeah, yeah, totally.
So you said you played tennis going into high school.
And then you acted.
Yeah, I was super into theater in high school and I like a real big gift that my dad gave us was like just obsession with TV and movies and film and everything.
grew up watching every movie that you could possibly imagine was just like that was what I was going to do.
I was going to be an actor.
I was going to move to Hollywood.
I was going to L.A.
This was like my path.
I had it laid out before me.
I knew that this was going to happen.
And so when I got into high school, I started acting.
And I did some plays in middle school, but they only did musicals.
And they basically did the same thing in high school too, where they would only do musicals.
And because I was going to be an actor, you know, I wasn't going to, I wasn't going to be in musicals.
I loved musicals.
I loved Broadway.
I loved all of that stuff, but I wasn't, I wasn't singing.
I'm an actor.
We've got to be in serious plays and I got to be in one serious play when I was in, when I was a freshman.
And then they ended up firing the guy that
would direct the serious plays and he could no longer work at the school.
And so then it was just all musicals from that point on and my acting career ended.
Were you both a theater kid and a tennis kid?
But it sounds like your school was pretty small.
So were people divided up like that and clicks like how they were in the big high schools and in the 80s movies and all that?
Was it still like that in your school?
Okay.
just on the smaller level.
So you had like cowboys because not only was our mascot cowboys, it was the Grantsville cowboys, but it was a small rural community.
It was a small rural farming community.
And so there was people that were legit cowboys and had horses and had to ride horses and were cutting hay and had to tend to the farm.
And so there was that group of uh clique.
And then you had like the skater slash stoner slash basically everything that was on the outside of society group of kids, right?
And then you had like athletes and popular kids and nerdy kids, all those things.
And what I, the core group of guys that I had in middle school that we really bonded with, as soon as we got into high school, it felt like um truthfully it happened when we started
getting licenses and we were able to.
spend time with girlfriends in a much easier fashion.
a lot of my buddies, almost what felt like all of them, I had three really close friends and they all got girlfriends and then they just left.
And so then it was like, I was hanging out by myself and they were always busy with their girlfriends and I got really tired of hanging out with them and their girlfriends.
And so I had to start making friends with all sorts of different groups of people and that really shaped high school for me.
was I had friends across what felt like all of those spectrums.
And I can see that like again through a perspective where, you know, that was a catalyst for me where my friends started getting girlfriends and I didn't have a girl.
I wanted a girlfriend.
I was trying to get girlfriends, but I didn't have a girlfriend.
And so I had to hang out with these other people.
But I also have like the ability to mask really well and show up and see what people um are expecting from me and then providing that for them.
because from childhood and trauma and survival mechanisms.
So I did a really good job of fitting in everywhere because I know how to fit in everywhere in order to survive.
So for sure.
But I also like the lens where it was like, cool, I was hanging out with people and I had friends in all these different groups, because I did.
And I'm also just like lonely as fuck because my best friends were gone and I needed somebody to hang out with.
and you weren't being your authentic self because you were a representation of the people you were with more than you.
I think a lot of, ah well, not just a lot of high schoolers go through that.
I think a lot of people do that throughout their lives, but especially in high school, you know, it's just such a crazy time.
Okay.
So when you graduated, did you go to college?
No, it's kind of an interesting because my my oldest brother went to college and then same thing my middle brother he went to college he went to the University of Utah and got his
degree in mechanical engineering and I planned on going to the same school like I was just going to follow in his footsteps and go to the University of Utah.
I wasn't going to go into engineering I was going to go into acting and go into drama and into the theater department and I was all set up to go and
like had a dorm room and everything.
And then at the last minute, I panicked and bailed on the whole thing and ended up moving to Minnesota with a girl that I met over the internet.
m
so wait, are we talking it's June?
You've graduated from high school.
You have your dorm like reserved.
like I graduated from high school and I've got all this stuff in place to go to college in the fall.
And during that time period, I had started talking to this girl on the internet, but at the time...
platform?
Because I was actually going to ask you, when did social media show up for you?
Would this have been MySpace?
Facebook Messenger?
No, way before.
took at school essentially was like this is a computer and this is how you use a computer and we have this new thing called the internet and you can create an email address and
then you can send each other emails in class.
So it was through an email and it was like a
Yeah, it was my senior year, so it was 99.
So it was a super random thing where it was a spam email with and back then you could see everybody's email address.
And so I just clicked on random email addresses and sent off a letter of, hi, my name's Craig and I'm looking for pen pals essentially, is what I treated it like.
And exactly.
but we actually wrote letters because we're older than you.
ah But okay, and so there was this one girl that you started.
she responded back and we would email back and forth during school and then it came time to graduate and I didn't have a computer at home and we didn't have any access to it back
then so it's not like I was going to be able to keep in touch with her.
So I gave her my phone number and then graduate, go on this big cool senior trip to Mexico, had this whole, you know, and then come, it's like some day in the middle of the
summer I come home and there's a message from this girl.
And I didn't even remember her name.
The message was like, Jess called.
Call Jess back.
And I'm like, who's Jess?
And I'm like, oh.
And then it all clicked and came back.
And we started talking on the phone and built this relationship over the phone.
And then all at the same time of like, I'm going to be going to college.
then I, like again, looking back, I can see it very differently.
Like I straight up panicked.
I was so scared to go to college and the, just the overwhelm of what that was going to look like and be like.
you know, just so much anxiety and fear about it that instead I, oh, I guess I'm going to move to Minnesota and live with Jess now because Jess and I are in a relationship.
to backtrack, we're in Mexico.
just have to know.
Did you do your senior trip?
Where did you do your
was a cruise to...
em
Gosh dang it.
in Sonata.
Okay, the only reason I ask is mine was Mazatlan.
So I was just curious what yours was.
And I don't know what our parents were thinking.
We didn't have a chaperone.
We just were a bunch of 18 year olds that went down there and did too much bad stuff.
Yeah, it was a fun, it was the, cause we went to California for a few days first and did like two days at Disneyland and then got on the boat and went down to Mexico.
And same thing like the chaperones were a joke, right?
They were two adults that were going on vacation.
They could care less that there was a bunch of teenagers.
at least at the time, you could drink at 18.
So we were able to go to the bars, went to senior frogs.
We were able to just, we went crazy.
I got sick on the boat.
It was the craziest thing where had a blast in California.
Everybody gets on the boat.
Like this is the most amazing trip that we've ever going to go on.
And while we were out at sea, I got strep throat and it got so bad that I couldn't even like swallow.
It was this terrible um sore throat.
So when it came time to like I even had to like pay the $50 and go see the doctor on the ship and
get some antibiotic prescribed and everything.
So I was in my cabin a lot of the time, just like miserable.
And by the time I started feeling better, we had already, so I didn't even get off the ship when we went to Mexico and everybody went and had a blast and came back with all of
these incredible stories.
And it's probably best because I was the kind of guy that would have like, I always did everything to the extreme.
I always had to do like the wild and the craziest thing imaginable.
So it's probably like,
The universe was looking out for me and be like, you're not allowed into Mexico at this state of your life.
You're not ready for what's here.
to tell about it.
Yeah.
You know what?
That's probably very true.
And I was just laughing to myself because when you said you got back and there was a message from Jess and I know some of our listeners are going to think on your phone a text
and it's like, no, these are landlines.
And it was a message.
I was going to say, I bet your mom wrote it, right?
Yeah.
That's awesome.
Yes.
And when you guys were talking, you were talking on a landline.
Yeah.
And I racked up like hundreds and hundreds of dollars in long distance.
uh
pay for long distance for anyone younger than us.
Yeah.
Yeah.
phone bills because of the phone call.
We would sit on the phone for like hours.
It was terrible.
called out of state, forget it.
How did you deal with that?
Because I remember racking up long distance bills and I had a roommate in college who did the same.
Your parents kind of come down on you a little bit, right?
Did you have to deal with it or did your mom was like, right?
point.
so basically, you know, I didn't have a really healthy relationship with my mom and I got away with way more in whether I should have or shouldn't have.
Right.
Who knows?
Right.
It all is what it is.
And being a parent now, I can see it from a bunch of different angles, too.
Right.
But um yeah, I yeah, she got mad at me and my, know, oh, sure, I'll pay those back.
I don't have a job.
The result is I just
And then you're like, and I'm not going to go to college and I'm going to Minnesota.
So there you go.
uh
happened was we talked over the phone and essentially, you know, we fall in love talking over the phone to each other and we decided that we want to meet.
And so she flies out to Utah from Minnesota because she had never seen the mountains.
She wanted to see mountains and then she wanted to see the ocean.
So her and I go on this road trip to California.
And it's basically the same road trip that I went on when I was eight years old in the back of the.
VW bug this time.
I'm just driving my mom's Saturn out to California with my new girlfriend from Minnesota So we had this incredible trip to uh To the ocean and to the California and we stayed in
Las Vegas and we had all of these really cool experiences and so she was out for like two weeks and Then when it came time for her to go back to Minnesota We still wanted to like
be together like we didn't want this to not be a thing and she had a job she was working at a not a
She was working at a casino that was on an Indian reservation.
And so she already had a job and she was like, you should come to Minnesota.
I can get us a place.
You can get a job at the casino.
Like all of these things were just laid out for me.
And I was like, that sounds easier than college where I am incredibly afraid.
I didn't suck at school.
I got perfectly fine grades.
If I really wanted to, I could have gotten like way better grades.
I just didn't care enough.
So I did the least amount of work possible and the idea that I was going to have to go back to college and do more work.
Cause all I wanted to do was go act.
I didn't want to go and have to do all the other shit.
I just wanted to go act.
I wanted to go perform.
I wanted to go learn more about that stuff.
So I bailed on that and I went to Minnesota instead.
And that was a crazy like, um, experience in of itself, you know,
What part of Minnesota?
It was this small town um called Brainerd.
It's north of the Twin Cities.
It's kind of um halfway up.
It's just outside of Fargo.
So Brainerd is actually like in the movie Fargo.
Are you guys movie people?
OK.
uh She's the sheriff of Brainerd.
So that's the city that I ended up
did you move in with her?
Yeah, so like she, we had the whole thing in Utah and then she flew back to Minnesota and got everything set up for us.
She went and got us a one bedroom apartment.
um She had it all set up to where when I showed up.
what happened was my mom and I packed up everything in my mom's car and my mom drove me to Minnesota and then dropped me off.
And then my mom drove back, drove back to Utah, but just had the apartment all set up for us.
Everything was ready.
I even already had like, I think I had to like fill out some paperwork or something if I remember right, but I feel like I already had the job at the casino.
Like it was a really easy thing where I just showed up and had all of these things.
as well?
Yeah, she was the same age that I was, but I feel like she was like, you know, six months older or something like that.
She was a little bit older than I was, but she wasn't like 19 or 20 or anything.
OK, so you guys are both working at the casino.
What do you do at the casino?
was a slot attendant.
And so I walked around the casino floor and paid out jackpots or filled up slot machines with coins because back in the day it was, yeah, I had like, it was the coolest job.
They gave me a billfold with like $3,000 cash in it.
And uh I'd walk around and pay out jackpots and make change for people and fix machines, little things like that.
And it was a lot of fun.
That was probably when people could still smoke too, right?
In the casino.
That's when I started smoking as well.
Yeah.
Well, it was like on break, you would go to the cafeteria that was like, you know, down below underneath the casino, right?
They've got all the different things below the main casino floor.
And that's where the cafeteria was.
So you go down there for lunch break and there's two cafes.
There's two rooms.
One of them is the non-smoking side and then the other side of the smoking side.
And there's an old lady crocheting in the non-smoking side by herself, right?
Eating her little at home lunch.
And then the other side is where everybody's at.
And I'm like, I gotta go sit in the smoking side.
So it was about two weeks before I started smoking.
is so funny.
That was probably on a reservation too then, right?
Yeah, okay.
So you guys are living together, you and Jess.
How long did you live together and both of you work at the casino?
I chuckle because it's terrible.
It was about two months.
It wasn't long at all.
Yeah.
Yeah, it was really quick.
Because another woman came on the scene.
There was a there was a another girl at the casino.
And I learned all about this after the fact, because essentially this was a big deal at the casino because it's a small little essentially it's just a small little town at the
casino.
All the employees know everybody.
Just as mom works at the casino as well.
So it's this whole, you know, small little community of people.
So it was a big deal when Jess flew to Utah to meet this person.
And then it was an even bigger deal that this person's now coming back here.
So everybody already knew about me before I got there.
And this girl that ended up, I mean, I was 100 %
Culpable not culpable.
What's the right word?
Like what ended up happening was I ended up?
uh Cheating on her with this other girl because this other girl was like laying it on really really thick and I'm like cool This is awesome.
Jess is like not my first girlfriend um But she was basically my first quote-unquote serious girlfriend prior to that It's like, you know silly high school stuff where I might
have been dating somebody for like three months or something
Right.
And I go from that experience to suddenly just living with somebody.
So it was a nightmare.
But this other girl knew that I was coming and her and her friend who also worked at the casino made this like little side agreement that they were going to try to break us up.
So he flirted with uh my girlfriend trying to like distract her over here and then she would flirt with me over here.
Anyways, it ended up working.
And then what ended up happening was I break up with Jess and then
start this relationship with this other girl, which basically it's not a relationship.
We're just sleeping together and couch surfing because she's living in the upstairs attic of the back garage of her fiance's grandmother's house and he's in prison.
Like it's just a big ball of chaos.
It's like the, right?
this is the part that might be the movie.
So you go from small town Utah to that.
You're just jumping it.
Well, you said you were extremes, right?
So you're like, I'm going for it.
Like if I'm to do it, I'm doing it.
So and did Jess stay in the apartment?
So she moved out for like two weeks.
It was like in my head.
I'm like, this is the easiest thing ever.
I didn't have a car either.
Jess had a car.
So I didn't have a car, but this new girl had a car.
So she also worked at the casino and she also worked to the same shift I worked.
So easy peasy.
I don't have to worry too much.
I still had a ride to get to where I needed to go.
And we had like a six month lease on the apartment, so we couldn't get out of the lease.
So now I had this like really nice apartment and I've got this new girlfriend and she's got a car and I'm fine.
Everything's okay.
And then Jess decided that she, cause she went back home for like two weeks and she's like, screw that.
I'm not moving back home.
So she comes back to the apartment and everything was in her name cause she was the one that got it all right.
So then she's like, no, I'm moving back in here.
And I'm like, that's fine.
I'll just sleep on the couch.
I can still live here too.
It was just a nightmare.
And so eventually I leave.
And then I'm like sleeping on the floor of this studio apartment with friends of a friend of a friend that we met at like Denny's at midnight one night.
it was just a nightmare.
And I ended up.
the two of you would couch surf.
No, we couched, we were staying at one of her friend's house uh for just a short short time.
And then what ended up happening, because I couldn't go stay with her, because like I said, she lived with grandma and she was engaged to grandma's.
Yeah.
And he ended up breaking out of jail and she like went and took him because he found out that she was sleeping with me.
So he breaks out of jail.
She goes and cuts him off at the pass basically and then whisks him away to the cabin in the woods so that he doesn't get picked up and taken back to jail.
And then she would periodically come into town.
And when she was in town is when she would come see me for like 15 minutes.
And all of my shit was in the trunk of her Ford probe that had a...
donut on it and it was in the middle of January in Minnesota, was like the worst.
mean, like Utah snow was legit snow, but Minnesota is a whole other beast.
So the kids there ride their snowmobiles to high school.
yeah.
my gosh.
So how long did that go on?
That lasted for just a couple of months.
Altogether, I think I moved to Minnesota in October and I was back home permanently in Utah by like March.
Yeah.
a whirlwind life in Minnesota and then you were like, okay, enough of this.
I need to get back home.
I'm tired of sleeping on the floor and having my clothes in a trunk.
Well, the whole thing was I was trying to convince this other girl.
I'm like, why are you with this guy?
He's clearly crazy and insane.
You don't like him.
Let's you and me.
Let's go to Utah.
We know how to get away from this.
Come on.
Let's hop in that sweet ass Ford Probe of yours.
It's falling apart.
We'll make it all the way back to Utah.
I'm sure.
So that was the whole thing was I was waiting for her and she kept being like, yes, yes, yes.
Eventually.
Yes, yes, yes.
Eventually just stringing me along.
And then it got to the point where I um didn't, I wasn't working anymore.
I didn't work at the casino.
I had like my last $150 check that I got from the casino for my final paycheck.
And I used that to buy a bus ticket back to Utah.
So I took a great bus.
did you quit the casino?
Was that intentional to not be working there?
OK, you were in your plan was that go home.
So then what did you do when you got home?
Did you get a job in the town that you're where you live?
no, the small town didn't really have a lot to offer.
They I mean, there's a lot of em manufacturing out there, but it's like a magnesium plant or a salt plant.
Like it's it's hard.
You know, there's I'm not interested in.
Eventually I would work at those places, but that's later on in life when I moved back out there.
uh When I got back from Minnesota, I started working in Salt Lake City as a server.
I started uh working at Cracker Barrel.
So I would drive in and out and then.
After I got the job at Cracker Barrel, I ended up uh renting an apartment with this other woman uh that worked at Cracker Barrel.
She was a single mom and she had a boyfriend that was in jail as well, but it was the type of thing that that was her baby's daddy and she needed a place to live because her parents
were going to not let her uh move back into the house.
I was like, well, I need a place to live.
Let's just get an apartment together.
So we had a two-bedroom apartment that we shared together and we were just friends.
And it was great for a short time.
then her boyfriend got out of jail and comes and lives with her in the apartment.
And then all of my shit started getting stolen.
And like, I would come back and you could clearly tell that everything had been gone through in my room.
And so she was supposed to be, what's that?
was this in Salt Lake City that you were living?
OK, OK, OK.
yeah.
And she was supposed to like cover half of the utilities.
And I found like the power bill that she hadn't been paying for like six months.
And that was in my name.
So it was just the silly like all the dumb stuff that you do when you don't know better, right?
When you're a teenager, all the stuff that I can see as a parent, you're like watching it.
And because we watched our kids do the same thing where you're just like, don't do that.
It's going to turn out this way.
And then they do that thing.
And you're like, well.
Yeah.
all of those things when I was that age.
And what happened was I was working at Cracker Barrel, living with this chick.
And then when everything kind of went south with her and we weren't dating, we were just like, again, living together.
I at the same time, I had started dating another not dating another person because again, I wasn't dating this woman.
Like, I really want to clarify.
And it makes it sound like I'm clarifying it because it's like, no, really, we weren't dating like.
has a record too.
yeah.
Yeah.
right?
100%.
This is admissible in court, right?
We were not dating back then.
But I met my first wife.
She started working at the Crack Barrel.
So we started dating and living together and pretty much immediately, yeah, just moved in together right off the bat.
Like I don't have a healthy understanding of what relationships are.
So...
I also, like the Mormon church is set up in such a way where the trajectory and the path for people, for kids in the church is you graduate from high school, for boys, right?
You graduate from high school, you go on a mission which lasts two years and then you come home from your mission and you get married.
So it's very common for everybody to, you know, be married and have kids by the time they're 22, 23, 24 years old.
And so...
there's a part of me that's subconsciously being driven by that.
And I'm also like my older brother that had gone off to college, he had gotten his girlfriend pregnant.
And so he was married now with a young boy.
And so when I met my first wife, she had a daughter that was um six months old.
And I immediately just like latched on to them.
Not in a, that sounded terrible, but I fell in love with.
her and then also with her daughter and ended up adopting her daughter, my daughter, um when she was 18 months old.
Yeah, so we got together, started living together.
She got a job with the post office.
So she's immediately had like a really nice paying job, but she was working all the time.
So I stayed home with our daughter.
And then uh we moved up to...
did you do that?
How long were you a stay at home dad?
So after we got married, we had another daughter and I stayed home with both of them until uh Maddie was in school.
And I would do like the part-time thing at night.
And I was waiting tables and delivering newspapers in the morning and pizzas in the evening, always doing like part-time stuff to make it work while I was staying home during
the day with the girls because...
My first wife had that.
I mean, she was making bank as a postal carrier and we had great benefits and everything.
She just had to work a ton.
Yeah, so you did the like when she when you had the newborn were you the one getting up at night then and doing all those things?
No, so like, because my oldest, she, like I said, I, when I met everybody, she was six months old.
And then essentially it's like I did all of the, because Ryan was at work all the time.
I mean, she would work because we, we lived in Layton and she worked in Bountiful and it was the, the
Traffic.
commute, right?
Going back in time to this time period.
It was long.
So she was working all day.
And um when she was home, yeah, she would, you know, take care of the kids and take care of the baby and everything like that.
um what was really challenging is when she started going back to work, our second daughter, um she didn't want to take a bottle.
So Ryan breastfed and pumped and we had all of this milk.
And so for like an entire month, she would just be
sobbing hysterically because she was so hungry and eat as soon as Ryan got home.
But so it was like this horrible process of trying to eventually get her to take a bottle because we were.
So, during the night, um Ryan would have to still get up and nurse through the night.
Okay.
Okay.
But it's still wake up and then go to...
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay.
So, um do you think being a stay-at-home dad gave you a new appreciation for what stay-at-home moms do?
100%.
Yeah.
in what way would you say?
so many different ways.
um There's so many good and bad things about it, just like parenting in general, There's so many parts of it that I don't think the...
If the dynamic is where there's one parent that stays home, whether it's the mother or the father and the other one is out working, right?
That one that's out working really doesn't know what they're missing.
It's so awesome to be there, to experience all of it.
It's so awesome to be so connected to your kids that way.
You know, and not only was I like stay at home dad, but it was like did all the cooking, all that like made all their birthday cakes.
Like, do you know what I mean?
Like I was that kind of dad and I loved it.
I loved it.
I loved it.
I loved it.
But I'm also, you know, like in my early 20s and suddenly I'm a stay at home dad with two kids.
And there's definitely the other part of me that's like.
That's not what I wanted to be doing at my life at that point, right?
But I still at the same time wanted to be doing it.
It just kind of happened that way where it was like, yeah, you got the better job.
At the time we were both servers at Cracker Barrel and we were trying to, she was living with her cousin and I moved in with her, which meant we were all three living in this like
little tiny two bedroom apartment with a uh one year old.
And so we needed to get our own place.
And neither one of our parents were an option.
Her parents weren't an option.
So we had to get a place.
it just worked out to where she got the job.
We were able to get the new apartment.
It's like it all made sense.
And in order to make it work, I'm going to stay home.
That's totally fine.
I'm happy to do that.
And I was excited to do that.
And then I would get those jobs in the evening time.
And that became like an outlet for me, as well as a little bit of supplemental income.
It's not that we really needed it, because she made enough money at the post office.
I did that for a long, time.
And then when the girls finally started going to school and um it became, you know, like I did a lot of like the field trips and I would go in and like read and do all the stuff
that you do.
know, those early years when they're in first and second grade and stuff like that.
And that was so much fun.
Like I loved being that dad sitting on the bus and going on those trips and stuff like that.
That was really, really fun.
But I think that's one.
moms towards you?
Was everyone really...
Did they think it was so cool as well that you're a stay-at-home dad and you were at everything?
Yeah, I think so.
Do you know what mean?
was like, it's yeah, yeah.
And we, was, um, it was, mean, we lived in Layton, which is, I mean, it's much different than a small, you know, community.
Like I grew up in, Grantsville, but at the same time, it's not, you know, I wasn't in downtown Salt Lake and even downtown Salt Lake isn't bad or anything like that.
So it was very much this small little community of people as well there too, but it was fun.
I really enjoyed that time period and it was a lot of fun.
And then there was the other side of it that I wanted something more.
wanted, but it's like I didn't even, you don't even know how to really express that at that stage of life.
you're still a kid at that age and you're very much adulting and parenting.
For me, that would come unnatural.
Probably Nicole's the natural one in that role for us.
I would have struggled with that.
But yeah, no, it's impressive that it's such a young age.
You were able to adapt to being home with the babies and raise them and and and completely, you know, just jump in.
Well,
it sounds like that's what you do.
You know, when you are doing something, you jump full in both feet and embrace it and embrace it.
So and then you did that until they were both in elementary school.
And then did you go to work?
Well, I never really went to work work.
It was always still just part time stuff.
um And then we ended up what happened was we ended up moving back out to Grantsville because we had a nice house up in Layton, but we had dogs.
got into uh Huskies and I had three Huskies and I
I had a sled and would run them in the wintertime and like do the whole nine yards.
So they became a big part of my life.
But we lived in a, like we lived in a cul-de-sac and it was still very much like um all the animal control rules and the regulations.
And we had one neighbor that was that neighbor that got pissed off when we finally brought in a third dog and called us in.
And so we had this issue with animal control because of the dogs.
Anyways, what ended up happening was instead of getting rid of one of my dogs, we decided to sell our house and move out to Grantsville.
That makes perfect sense to have three dogs.
And huskies aren't quiet dogs.
They actually are.
pretty really like they're not barky.
They're not loud.
They're really, really...
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So wait, you were, uh what's it called again?
It's not sled, right?
Dog sledding?
What is it?
Dog sledding?
So em would you compete?
I didn't do any real like, I just did like amateur races with them.
um So we did a little bit of that.
uh Mostly it was just recreational stuff.
was just like, it was so much fun being out with them.
there was, yeah, yeah.
And there's great snow there.
So in the winter time, it's easy.
There was plenty of places to take them.
And then like in the summertime when there's not snow, then we're out camping and hiking.
And I used to have a, like a dry land scooter that was built on a
stainless steel, nice titanium frame, like on a skateboard deck with big wheels and everything.
And I'd hook them up to that and they'd pull me around on that when there wasn't snow and stuff.
Yeah, so.
get into that?
I was working at this Mexican restaurant and one of the guys, the main cook at the restaurant, had a couple of huskies who had puppies.
And so we were over at his house.
He had like the house that we would all go and drink beer after work and hang out and play pool in the garage and smoke and everything.
And he just happened to have these huskies.
And when they had uh puppies, I was like, my gosh, I want one of these.
And he's like, yeah, dude, you can have one.
And so I went over to pick one up and ended up picking up two of them.
So I got a brother and a sister originally.
came home with two huskies and those were, I mean, just the most incredible dogs.
And shortly after that, I went back and got their uncle, because he had a bunch of dogs there and he wasn't really a good dog owner.
So I went back and got their uncle.
So now we had three dogs and eventually we had, you couldn't have three dogs, you can only have two dogs.
But our neighbor was okay when we only had three dogs.
And then I was friends with this woman who lived up in the mountains and she had a huge kennel with like 30 plus dogs.
And she had a new litter of puppies and one of them needed to be socialized.
Like she wanted my daughters to play with them and you know, she didn't have kids at her place.
So we brought that dog down to stay with us for a while so that it could get socialized and hang out with us.
And that was what the neighbor saw.
okay now they're getting four dogs and that became the thing that pushed him over the edge and that's when he called and reported us.
em But yeah.
And so then you guys moved back to.
Yeah.
to Utah.
And during this time period too, uh I'm also cheating on my first wife during that time period.
And all of that eventually comes out once we move back out to Grantsville.
And I continue.
It's what, it doesn't matter how it originally started necessarily, but it was the thing that eventually ended our relationship.
But once we moved back out to Grantsville, it
because our relationship was kind of already funky because of what I was doing and because of the disconnect between the two of us and everything like that.
Then moving back out to Grantsville ended up just kind of being, although on one hand it was for the dogs and it was a good thing for the dogs.
The dogs got a great big backyard house with this huge six foot wooden fence.
Like we got this house that was perfect for the dogs.
Not so much for us, but yeah, we moved back out to Grantsville and that's when I'm
Okay, go ahead.
I'm sorry.
I was going to say, was it the same woman that you were cheating?
Okay, so you were cheating with multiple women while you guys were married?
And did she know that before going out to Grantsville?
No, uh whether or not she knew it, I'm sure she probably knew it, but we hadn't talked about it.
Okay, so she took a leap of faith and went with you.
Kind of knowing something's off.
don't know.
I mean, I think, you know, again, we didn't have any conversations about it until after we had moved out to Grantsville.
And no, no, I did.
I ended up divulging all of it and communicating all of it.
Was there a reason, like what made you decide to tell her?
I mean, truthfully, you know, it's the guilt and the shame of it all that eventually got to me and caught up in a sense.
And that was the catalyst for it.
But in some ways, too, it was just life getting to a point where things were too chaotic and too crazy, really.
Were you also cheating in Grantsville?
Okay.
So, and that's probably a much harder place to hide that.
assume it's a smaller town, right?
I mean, yes and no at this point, like it's a lot different than it was when I was growing up, even though it wasn't that much time difference, but m it was a lot different once I
moved back out there.
And um yeah, it wasn't a difficult thing.
So how long were you guys together in Grantsville before you divorced?
I don't remember the whole time frame of all of it as far as like, you know, I think we moved out to Grantsville in 2007 or 2008 and then we were divorced by 2010, 2011.
Altogether we were together for 10, 11 years.
Okay, and that's still a decent amount of time to stay together, even knowing what was going on.
It sounds like she wanted to work it out.
Yeah, was, you know, it's kind of a banana situation where uh we ended up getting divorced and then remarrying again like a year later because, yeah, yeah, trying to make it work
again.
And then when you got divorced, did she stay in Grantsville or did she go back?
No, she did.
Again, she was working at the post office.
She still had her same job.
She was just commuting now from the other end of the valley, basically.
And um when we first got divorced, she moved in with my mom.
My mom lived down the street from us.
um it was the, I mean, it's literally the house that I bought was, you I used to play across the street from it when I was a kid.
It was a house that was right up the street from where I grew up.
um so she moved down there and lived with my mom for a short time.
but that wasn't a real conducive situation.
So then we switched.
She moved back into the house and I moved in with my mom.
And then uh eventually she got a condo in Tewila the next town over.
So she moved out.
It's a couple of those little different moves, but throughout that time period, we're also trying to continue to like figure this out and make it work in a sense.
And yeah, it was super stressful.
right?
Yeah, man.
What about the girls?
Did you guys split custody?
Yeah, yeah, we would basically just swap back and forth based off of our work schedules kind of thing.
And then depending upon, you know, if the, you know, the holidays and stuff like that, based off of, we would always try to share as much as we could.
So there were times that we were like, if, know, we're doing Thanksgiving on a Thursday and they're doing it on a Saturday, then we both are just kind of taking turns and swap
them back and forth.
So I was still, the dogs were the hard part.
um Bless their heart, right?
um But I was still raising, you know, I was still involved.
I was still with the kids half the time.
you know, so it was really just kind of switching back and forth.
So they basically lived with both of us and we kept them in their same school.
their life didn't change as much as possible, um even though obviously it's a huge, massive change.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then the dogs, did they stay in the house?
then, so when you were in the house.
originally.
even when I moved out of the house and she moved back into the house, um the dogs still stayed with her and stayed there at the house and everything.
I mean, they were my dogs.
I was the one that got them.
I was the one that was into them.
I was the one that was training and working with them, but they were our family dogs too.
They were super sweet dogs.
So she was cool.
she moved and got her condo?
Did you keep the dogs?
No, it's a really sad, sad story.
So...
Yeah.
Oh no, what happened?
story.
Like it's honestly one of those things that I have like a hole in my heart over because they were just incredible dogs for so many different reasons and they helped me so many
ways over the time period that I have.
Like you guys are dog people.
It sounds like right.
So I'm a dog person.
I've been a dog person my whole life like and I've only had a handful of dogs throughout my life because I tend to have dogs for a really, really long time.
So I had these dogs for a long time and they were really important to me.
But when all of this was playing out and I was getting divorced at the same time, I was um working as a correctional officer.
So I had a couple of different jobs, very similar to where I could now get quote unquote, like a career and a job because the girls were old enough and you know, we were not
necessarily worried about daycare or anything like that.
So I never really had a job job.
I was working at like the Walmart distribution center in the warehouse and
I went to work out at the magnesium plant doing stuff out there, but eventually I got the opportunity.
What's that?
Yeah.
Right.
And, uh, I just saw an ad in the newspaper for, uh, the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office was hiring for corrections to work on the Salt Lake County jail.
So I applied for that, got in and started going through the process of going through the academy and working in the jail.
And the Salt Lake County jail is the
Next to the state prison, it's the biggest correctional facility in the state.
So it's a huge facility.
And suddenly I'm, you know, managing a housing unit with 64 prisoners and I'm one officer in that unit with them.
Like it was a whole huge experience.
I worked at the jail for like two and a half years and then transitioned and went out onto the road and became a police officer uh in Tooele, which is the next town over from where
we lived.
So all of that's happening at the same time as the divorce.
slash ending of the relationship and everything like that.
And the toll of all of that in conjunction with like the living, like the reality of what I was experiencing as a police officer every day, as well as like the chaos of my personal
life and like I'm living at my mom's, I'm, you know, it's just all of this chaos and stress and the dogs started getting out and running around town and killing chickens and
Oh, no.
because I was a police officer, I had a relationship obviously with the entire law enforcement community in the valley because it's such a small valley.
So the animal control officer is trying to like help me by not, know, making like I got cited for it.
I had to pay restitution for like dead chickens and stuff like that.
But at some point it becomes an issue if it keeps happening because
uh As a police officer, there's this whole mentality of like, I mean, it's not the type of thing where like they're gonna sweep it under the rug and it's not gonna be a big deal.
Like it's gonna be a bigger deal because I'm not taking care of this issue that's an issue and if it keeps happening then it goes from like a little tiny class A misdemeanor that
doesn't really mean anything.
It's the equivalent of a traffic ticket to suddenly now I'm getting criminally charged for something because I can't take care of my dog.
So the level of stress that I was under was a lot and it broke me and it was terrible and it was hard.
So.
After bringing my dogs to my mom's house and building a fortress in her backyard out of kennels, like kennel paneling, right?
They would rip through the kennel paneling and chew through it and get out.
And so I ended up taking one of them to the Humane Society thinking that that would help.
So I'd only had two left.
And then when those two kept getting out, I was just at a breaking point where I had the animal control officer come and get them.
and go put them down because I didn't know what else to do with them.
So was a really terrible moment in my life that was just like super dark from every angle and corner.
sounds like, I mean, everything that could be going wrong was going wrong.
You had a lot on your plate.
It was a perfect storm.
And one dog requires attention, let alone three.
And these dogs were used to being active, right?
They're used to being outside.
like my dogs, the one I had one, like I said, there was three main dogs that I had and I had a fourth dog for a while.
um But she didn't work out.
There was nothing wrong with her anything like that.
She just wasn't the greatest dog for mushing and I was like, I was looking for mushing dogs and running dogs.
But one of my dogs, the uncle that I had rescued back in the day when the other two dogs were little, he had been beaten and he was like really a
Like he wasn't aggressive aggressive, but he was not a happy camp.
And like he was a dog that took a lot of work and he really, really trusted me and he was like my dog.
And he would break out of the house and come down the street to where I was at my mom's, even though I wasn't there because I was at work.
Like he knew where I was and he was like, I got to go stay with that guy.
So it was really, really hard.
It was, know.
Well, yeah, yeah.
I mean, they're wicked smart.
Huskies like the reason they are, you know, they're good escape artists because they're super smart.
Yeah.
One of our dogs is a shepherd and I'm smart like that.
They're smart too.
And they have high anxiety, but yeah, he would do the same thing.
In fact, he's my Velcro dog.
And if he happens to get, he rarely gets up, but if he does, he just goes to the front door and sits and waits to get in because he doesn't want to leave.
He's just that bad.
But no, mean, it sounds like, so the correction officer's job, one person to 64 prisoners,
Did you have extensive training before you were put in that situation?
How crazy would it be if it was just like a weekend, you know?
No, it was an extensive training that I went through.
It was like a...
the way everything's going.
I wouldn't have been shocked if you said I went to like a Monday, Friday through Sunday training.
I was working on Monday.
Yeah, right.
No, it was a whole Academy process.
So I'm trying to remember how it was.
It was a couple of months of training.
Essentially.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Basically there's two parts of like law enforcement.
There's special functions and then there's LEO like law enforcement officer.
So special functions is one portion of training and then LEO is the other portion.
And if you just have this portion, then you can be a jailer.
You can be a corrections officer.
But then you need the LEO portion in conjunction with it if you're going to be a police officer on the road.
And is the LEO like double the time, like the same amount of time as the first Academy?
Okay.
And uh so I went through the this portion of the Academy, which is all ran through the Sheriff's Department.
Like they have their whole training Academy and everything's in house through there because it's a huge it's the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Department.
So they cover the entire County, you know, uh so we went through a very lengthy process.
Like I felt well trained for the job, even though the job was incredibly overwhelming.
I had no idea that
I had no perception of what jail was other than from what I had seen on movies and TV my whole life.
Never been to jail, never, you know, really had any awareness of what it was.
And this jail specifically, they were doing, they call it direct supervision.
So the inmates are out walking around like in the main, the main area, that main housing area, your entire shift and you're the only one in the room with them.
And so
I had no idea of that.
They take us over to the jail the first day and you walk in and you see 64 people.
There's 32 cells, 16 on the bottom and 16 on top, and each one has two guys in it, And you're just like one officer to 64 people.
And you go in and you push unlock and they all come out of their rooms and they watch TV and they talk on the phones and they go to the shower and whatever, right?
uh But at first it was completely overwhelming.
It was such a foreign environment for me.
the only law enforcement officer there too.
And you're not one of them.
Wow.
So ah did you create relationships with these guys?
were you not supposed to really talk to them and have any type?
Were you supposed to be hands off the whole time?
You have to like the what's really important is that you always have a clear boundary of the relationship that's being built.
Right.
So it's never um like we're never friends.
I'm not building a relationship with anybody.
But at the same time, I because it's depending upon the type of officer that you are.
There were some officers that very much went in there and used that um energy in that relationship building and became friends with people as a survival mechanism.
Right.
And those officers were the ones that they would take advantage of and do things behind their back because they knew that they could get away with it.
So I wasn't doing that, but I also wasn't because there were guys that would go in there and just be like really hard asses the entire time.
So I tried to find some middle ground where they knew where like my boundary was and I was respectful and I was, you know, personable with people.
didn't treat them like they were less than and I didn't treat them like they were, you know, terrible people.
I tried to treat them like people.
but still have a boundary, so.
And were they like.
though.
Like it was so hard because some of them are like really terrible people and it's really difficult.
And then others of them are like my fucking buddy.
Like there was so many people in there that are just the vast.
I shouldn't even say the vast majority of it.
All of them are just people.
Right.
But like they're not all what you would think are like hardened criminals and like it's just somebody that's had a bad day or a lot of people were just addicts.
A lot of it was mental illness and you know.
Yeah, it was hard to see.
guys that were my same age that I would like very easily be friends with if we weren't in this circumstance, right?
I remember there was a guy who when he came in and I started seeing him at the beginning of his stay um because he was an addict, he was in terrible shape, right?
And then like three, four months, five months later, I'm in a different area of the jail and I see him again and he's a completely different person because he's stabilized on meds
and he's super personable and
Do you really mean it was just bananas to see that but.
I'm sure every day was just a psychological drain in a lot of ways because there had to have been something each day you came across that was like that.
Whether it was a transformation or a connection or where you had empathy and seen someone's situation, I'm sure there wasn't a day that went by where you weren't affected.
Yeah, there really wasn't.
It was a really, really hard job.
hardened criminals though too, like people who had murdered people and they had them all together?
So the difference between jails and prisons, right?
Prison is where you go once you're sentenced.
Jail is where you go waiting for sentencing.
Or you've got sentenced to jail for a year or you you might get a year and a half.
You would get sentenced to jail, but it would be a very short amount of time.
But the vast majority of people there are waiting for sentencing.
So they're in that process, that limbo period where they've been arrested, but they haven't been sentenced yet.
And so we had the entire spectrum of, you know, people in there.
so depending upon what housing unit you were working in, it might be minimum security and you'd have 64 prisoners out.
And then if you were working the max units, maximum security, and specifically they had specific units, even within the maximum security units where you would have two officers
in that.
uh housing unit and you would only let out sometimes one prisoner at a time and that prisoner would be fully shackled and belly chained and handcuffed and everything like
that.
yeah, I worked throughout the entire gel over the course of the time that I was there, all the different housing units and areas.
while you're doing this and you're living with you're living it back at home with your mom, were you still trying to work on your marriage or was that done by that point?
wasn't what happened was by the time I got a divorce, I was already a police officer out on the road, right?
So I'm already a cop.
wasn't working in the jail anymore.
I did two and a half years in the jail and then was able to transition and get out onto the road and became a police officer.
And altogether total, I did about eight years in law enforcement.
So.
to leave corrections and become a police officer?
uh I got into Corrections thinking that it was going to be the stepping stone to becoming a police officer because I didn't really want to go and sit at a jail.
I didn't want to be inside.
I didn't want to, you know, I wanted to be a cop.
I wanted to be out there doing stuff.
So it was the plan all along.
And even though at some point I was like, well, you know, there's a, some people really like the jail environment and they like being able to like,
that really jives for people, that was definitely not the case for me.
So I knew that I had to get out, but it took a while, um, in order to get hired on.
career progression you start in the jail and become the police officer?
Yeah.
it's really common.
There was a lot of guys that I went through with that did the same thing.
And um at the time I was trying to, so was working in Salt Lake Valley, but living out in Tooele that 45 minute commute and the shift was seven days a week.
So I was in and out every day.
It was really, really hard.
So I wanted to work in the community that I lived in.
I wanted to work out in Tooele.
So I started reserving as a reserve officer for Tooele city.
So that meant that I didn't get paid anything.
um It was uh basically a part-time gig where I'm essentially volunteering my time.
And because I didn't have both parts of the certification that was needed, I always had to have uh another person with me.
So on my days off from the jail, I would go and volunteer and work at the police department.
But I did that for over a year.
And it got to the point where I knew who I liked working with.
So whenever those shifts were working is when I would come out so I could work with...
essentially the guys that I was starting to become friends with and liking.
And they, like, because I had all the experience that I had, they were just like, yeah, fine, do whatever.
They would just ride along with me and we'd go out and do stuff.
And I got really comfortable and basically a lot of really good hands-on training with the intention of these guys are going to hire me at some point.
And it kept getting longer and longer.
And they had a couple of hiring, um a couple of hirings that went by and I didn't get it.
And I'm just like, what is this going to take, right?
So eventually they agreed to hire me and put me through the academy so that I could get the rest of the certification that I needed.
And they would cover the cost of what that would entail.
But they also were not hiring me as a full-time employee.
So I had to quit the gel and cash out my 401 in order to basically provide and still maintain for the time period that I was going through the academy.
And then they, like, if you graduate from the Academy, then we'll hire you after the fact.
So there was this three month time period where I quit and we were living off of my retirement.
And this was still my first marriage.
And, eventually halfway through the Academy, when the Academy found out that they hadn't hired me full time, there was a insurance issue because essentially if I'm a full-time
employee, then if anything happens to me, I'm covered under that insurance rather than the Academy having to.
cover it.
And so was a liability issue in the end.
And eventually, Tooele City was like, fine, we'll hire you.
So I got hired.
decision.
Yeah, yeah.
So you got the job.
Sorry to say you could be screwed, but I'm glad to hear that.
So were you in a squad car?
Like out on, and did you have a partner?
was just a regular police officer.
And did you have a partner?
No, no, that's like only in really, really big cities do you have a partner, but yeah, you're riding around it by yourself.
So I would work on a crew with, um, usually it was me and two, maybe three other guys and one sergeant.
So you'd have four to five guys on a shift and we worked 12 hour shifts for the whole city.
How big was Tooele said?
How big was?
OK, so did you have anything exciting happen during that time?
oh you would you encountered all of it?
All of it.
oh And you did that for how long?
I did that for just over five years and then that's what I got fired.
So, like, again, like all chaos time period, right?
Everything's just fucking chaos for me on top of like trying to become a police officer and figure out how to be a police officer.
Um, shortly after becoming a police officer, I meet Stephanie.
Stephanie is a 911 dispatcher.
I'm still married to my first wife during this time period, but I meet Stephanie and
just fall in love with her.
And because of everything that took place with my first marriage, I was like, okay, I'm not going to go down the path that I went down before.
So I'm going to end this relationship officially, like 100%, like I'm going to do the thing so that I'm not doing the thing that I used to do.
And did that, ended the relationship, got divorced again after getting remarried, like a year ago, and then started dating Stephanie.
And
have you found the root of why you cheated?
Yeah, yeah, that's the MDMA and the repressed memories.
Yeah.
oh So you met Stephanie um and how long were you guys together before you got married?
We met.
um
Gosh, what year was it?
We met in 2012.
No, we met in 2011 and then we started dating in 2012 after it she was also married at the time.
So after both of our relations, both of our marriages ended, then we started dating.
But we were totally flirting and dating and talking, not dating, but communicating and like connecting during that time period as both of those relationships were coming to an
end.
And then we start uh living together at the time.
m
Like I've got my MO is like, Hey, do you have a car and a house?
Cool.
I want to date you.
So, so I'm essentially living with stiff Stephanie, right?
I'm living at my mom's because I'm and Ryan still has the house.
I'm living at my mom's, but really I'm just staying at Stephanie's and start essentially just living there.
And we decided to move in together.
So we bought a house together in Grantsville in
2014, I think it was, and then we got married in 2015.
So we were together for a few years and living together and totally blended our families together.
She's got two kids.
I had two kids.
We came together and blended our family and moved in together in this cute little house in Grantsville.
Now is she from that area as well?
Yeah, she grew up in an even smaller town uh that was like in the middle of nowhere up above the mountain range that I lived just below.
But she grew up in the same area, the same county.
She went to, we never ran into each other.
No, we joke about, we think that there was definitely, because we've put together some pieces, there was a time period before I was a cop and before I was a corrections officer,
during the time period where I was.
divorced before I had gotten remarried again.
So it was like almost like a rum spring a time period where I was working as a bartender and doing all sorts of crazy things that I never really got the opportunity to do before
ever in my life.
And probably there was a night there where Steph was at the bar and hanging out because it was the only cool bar in town.
she probably we probably crossed paths a couple of times, but we don't have any memory of it.
And then is she, is her family Mormon?
Does she come from that background?
No, well, yes, she does.
Her grandparents and her family is, but she wasn't raised in it.
Kind of.
But we went to church.
I was baptized and raised.
we were Jack Mormons, is what they're called, because we would only go to church on Sunday.
We're not doing anything else.
em But Stephanie wasn't really raised in the church.
She wasn't baptized.
Her mom used to drop her off at the Mormon church and leave because her mom wasn't gonna go back.
But if she wanted to go, I'll drop you off.
And then her two children, are they close in age with yours?
Yeah, so our oldest daughter, which is my oldest daughter, she's 26 and then the two daughters, Steph's daughter.
this I hate talking about because they're just my kids.
They're all my kids.
I've adopted.
I've adopted Asher.
Yeah, they're all my kids, but two of them are the same age.
So we've got two daughters.
Yeah, we've got two daughters that are the same age.
They were both both born in 2002.
So that was really fun for a while where they were the same age and yeah.
awesome.
Because sometimes when that happens, when a family's blended, like the one person's kids might be like seven years older, you know, and it's awkward, right?
But her two, which are your two now, but at the time her two were close, close age, so it was probably cool for them to hang out and play and stuff, right?
It totally was.
Yeah, there was definitely a nice little, almost like a honeymoon period of that relationship as well.
Like where the kids all kind of like got together and played together and we had fun and it was nice and everything was good.
then life changes, of course, and things go in different directions.
But um yeah, so three girls and then a boy.
And all the girls are adults and our oldest is married and they're in relationships and living on their own.
all doing really, really good.
And then we've still got our 19 year old son living with this.
OK, so then so you guys get married in 2015.
She's.
right after I get so she's a 911 dispatcher.
So she's the one that I'm talking to on the radio.
So we basically work together.
And I got fired right after we got married.
went on our honeymoon.
And when I got back from my honeymoon, they put me on administrative leave.
And go ahead.
Right.
Why did you get fired?
Yeah, it's it's not really a good when I say it's not a good story.
It's not a cool story.
It's just kind of like
Big overarching reasons why I got fired was because the truth of it was the amount of emotional pain and um trauma and difficulty that I had experienced in such a short amount
of time at this job really, really fucked me up.
And it was massively impacting how I was showing up and interacting with people.
I was always the type of person, again, the same thing that I had as far as like when I was a corrections officer, like
I'm seeing everybody as a person, but I have a very clear boundary line.
And it's like, as soon as you cross that boundary, you know, then you're in handcuffs and then you're going to go to jail and there's going to be consequences and all those kinds
of things.
So I wasn't a shitty cop in the sense of like um an asshole, but I also was very straightforward and very um direct about things.
And I also tended to deal with more of the...
um
drug side of the experience.
We had a lot of drugs in this city and it was a huge issue in all different aspects.
It was also that was where that's the criminal elements.
So that's where all the fun stuff is.
That's where we're chasing people and there's foot pursuits and vehicle pursuits and all sorts of fun, exciting things.
So that tended to be where I aimed and focused on a lot of things because not only was it a huge, a massive amount of adrenaline rush, but it was also a way that it felt like I was
serving and helping and doing something.
And
It's all just a big game in the end.
Like the criminal element knows that they're playing a game.
We know that we're playing a game and it's just a game where they know what they can do and what we can't do and vice versa.
So we play a game and part of that game is they bitch and moan and complain because I'm harassing them.
And I'm like, I'm not harassing you.
I'm just following you because you're selling drugs.
Anyways, I eventually got written up so many times for things that weren't even things.
were like, literally people would come in and say that I swore at them when I arrested them.
And then I would get disciplined for swearing at people.
and told that I shouldn't be swearing at people.
Very confusing mindset if you think about law enforcement from like what we think of law enforcement to be like, but this is a small Mormon community and the chief of police was,
um came from a different mindset in policing.
So I got written up a bunch for dumb shit and eventually there was something that they were able to use and write me up to the spot where now I um had so many disciplinary
actions that they could.
basically fire me at this point.
And what had happened, like I said, the toll of the job was so drastic and so severe that it was just like, um it was just terrible.
It just really destroyed me.
I'm an incredibly like empathic, loving, kind person.
And there's such a level of like death that you experience as a police officer because every time there's somebody dies, police officers are typically, and I shouldn't say
typically, they
90 % of the time they are unless by any, you know, if it's like clearly in hospice kind of situation.
But other than that, you're showing up on every dead body and there's a lot of people that die all the time.
So I happened to go to a lot of those calls and some of those calls were really, really tragic and really, really terrible.
And the worst ones are the ones when they're involving kids and there was a lot of those calls that I had to go through and experience.
So that weighed super heavily on me mentally and emotionally.
on top of like the anxiety and the adrenaline and the pressure and the stress.
mean, it's an incredibly insane job uh that should be treated very, very, very differently in this country where like police officers shouldn't work for 20 years as a police
officer.
should be like a very short amount of time where you work one day as a police officer and then you have like two days off and then you work one more day as a police officer and
then you have like two days off and the recovery time and all those kinds of things.
So it fucked me up.
And in one way, that's what really led to me getting fired because I just kind of like stopped fighting.
They gave me the option.
They're like, they sent me away to a psychiatrist to see if I was fit for duty anymore.
And instead of like going through the game of lying to the psychiatrist about things, I just like told him what was going on and explained to him everything.
And then they deemed that I wasn't fit for duty anymore.
And at that point they had enough to fire me for it.
And there were other agencies that like wanted me to go work for them and stuff.
I, once it happened and I was essentially, once I knew that it was something that was going to go away, I didn't want to pick it back up again.
Yeah.
Yeah.
was really deep down inside.
I was really, really grateful because it was, it probably would have been the thing that would have killed me.
Cause I was like all in, I was like a hundred percent like I was on the SWAT team.
I was so passionate about it.
had a uh
Like the path that was laid out before me, was very much like, this was my gig and this is what I was going to be and this is what I was going to retire as.
like, I was a hundred percent cop all the time.
And then.
sounds like you don't compartmentalize things.
You feel them when they're happening and your nervous system reacts to it and physiologically, psychologically, emotionally, everything.
And I think for cops that do this, they must compartmentalize everything in order to continue and almost become where they don't feel anything because they have to to survive.
Is that a correct assumption?
Absolutely.
mean, it's very much that's why, you know, there's such a disconnect.
Police officers have a very, um you know, we're acting and behaving one way with each other.
And then when we turn around and face public and society, it's very much this affective way of connecting with everybody else because you're on the other side of this wall.
And that other side of that wall is the wall that...
you know, we distance ourselves from in order to protect ourselves from it.
And yeah, the compartmentalization is insane because you literally go from like your worst, like the worst experience that you've ever experienced before or had to witness or
just be like in and then just go make a routine traffic stop for somebody that runs a stop sign or go talk to somebody about their neighbor's barking dog or do you mean the swing
back and forth between?
Like talk about nervous system, you you're going from adrenaline insane dumps to like devastation and then having to pretend like everything's fine.
And then when somebody yells at you, you're just supposed to smile and be like, it's all good.
Yeah, yeah, the disassociation that you have to be, you know, and then if then if you do that long enough, it's learning how to um flip the switch back on within relationships and
your personal relationships with your children, with your spouse.
I think a lot of times those relationships fall apart because you can't you can't jump, tap back in.
You know.
Yeah, so so it was a blessing for you.
Very much so.
Yes, such a huge blessing.
there's, you know, looking back, it's the same thing where I can see it now for the real gift that it was and how it very much would have led to the end of our relationship as
well as potentially like, because it was dark, it was really, really dark for me.
It was hard.
I have a question on that.
So the timing of that and the being in small town Utah, I bet the opioid crisis was alive and well, right?
We call it in Joe Public, the opioid crisis.
What you're describing is that front row seat taking action that none of us really have any insight into, right?
Was that kind of going on then?
Is that what you're describing?
Yeah, 100%.
Like this is like 2011, 2010.
I'm trying to remember exactly when I started.
It was before it was acknowledged that there's a fucking problem in this country with opioids.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
then meth was getting really, really big.
And that's the time frame.
uh And also it started transitioning from meth to heroin.
Like we started seeing the people that were, you know, it used to be meth.
Now we were seeing heroin more and more.
And so the level and the truth of it is, is it's like people are really oblivious to how much that
drug culture exists in all of society and all communities.
Like, even though Tooele was, you know, 45,000 people and, you know, you would expect it to be there and it very much was there, it was in all communities.
It was in Grantsville.
It was, it's very, very prevalent.
And it's, you know, what was so sad too was I started to see things so vastly different.
And this happened in the jail.
was kind of the thing where...
I would see these people change and because I was interacting with them so much on a daily basis, I was seeing them so completely different.
I wasn't seeing them as a prisoner.
I wasn't seeing them as a bad guy.
wasn't seeing, know, during the academy, they very much train you and program you to see them as the prisoner.
That's a prisoner.
You're the officer.
It's this clear delineation so that we don't have any blurred lines and boundaries.
but it sets up such a shitty dichotomy just for human relationships, right?
And so I couldn't help but see these people as just people, because that's what they are.
And I would have some really heartbreaking conversations with people sometimes in the middle of the night as I'm walking around.
Everybody's in their cell and I'm doing my last little tour before I leave, right?
And having some real personal conversations where they just stopped me and they needed somebody to talk to.
And I'm just listening.
in hearing like how terribly tragic their life has been and what's led them up to this spot, right?
Just horrible stories.
And I had an aunt, she's still my aunt, I was going say, I had an aunt growing up, she's still my aunt today, but um she was bipolar.
And I got to witness firsthand, we grew up next door to them.
So I lived right next door to my aunt, my uncle, and my, I have a cousin, two cousins, uh brother and a sister essentially is what they are, because we're so close in age, we grew
up together.
But
Because I got to watch my aunt navigate her mental illness over the course of my childhood, I had uh compassion for mental illness because I saw it firsthand and could see
how people would go from, you know, in a manic state what that actually looks like and what happens in that state.
And one of the things that was really beneficial for me as well at the jail was really good mental health training.
There was a program that wasn't built in, it wasn't
given it was an extra additive kind of like extracurricular activity almost right.
You had this extra training that you could go take and it was a week long um training centered around mental health and learning how to basically essentially be a police
officer where that's your forefront of thinking where you're seeing everything through the lens of mental health and interacting with people through that lens.
Like during the training we went to the state hospital and
got to sit with people and hear stories and talk to people and learn things and tons of information about just mental health and what's taking place.
And I started to see how prevalent it was with everybody, not just the people that were in prison that I was dealing with as prisoners, but all of us.
So it really started to open up my eyes.
And then when I went on the road, even more so, right, because now I'm getting an even bigger scope of public and seeing behind the scenes of everybody's lives where
We all present something outwards, but then as soon as we go into our house, it's a completely different world.
And as a police officer, you see everybody in their most intimate moments because of what happens, right?
And everybody's fucked up.
And I mean that like in the most loving way.
There's nobody out there, no level of society or culture from the bottom to the top that isn't struggling.
And so how can I go and arrest the person that's got meth in their pocket?
who is 100 % struggling emotionally, mental health, maybe schizophrenic, all of these issues, right?
I've arrested guys that I grew up with.
Like, it's so hard to see that and not only not be affected by it, but also see how, again, that game is so asinine.
I wasn't doing anything.
I wasn't benefiting anybody.
The people that I was trying to protect, what's that?
is benefiting because it is, as much as they're incarcerated and we'd like to think of them as criminals, they are victims of an addiction and a society that's allowed this shit
to seep in.
I'm not claiming to have any answers for it, but I think incarceration and what you're kind of that mental health training you got versus how you show up in the jail and treat
people that have to be in.
pretty almost direct conflict, seems like.
One's compassionate and understanding, the other is let's keep our boundaries and we're not buddies and get your ass back in your cell.
It's gotta be, I mean, I can relate.
Not that I can relate, but I don't think I can handle that either.
Eventually, just would, you either die inside, I think, or you get the hell out of it.
Sounds like you got out.
Yeah, that's what it really felt like too, where like the part of me, I could feel that part of me that was going cold and dying inside.
I remember we were, there was a New Year's Eve and um there were way more people that were on shift because it was New Year's Eve.
So even some of like the detectives that wouldn't necessarily be out working at 10 o'clock at night, everybody was on shift because it was supposed to be busy, right?
It wasn't busy.
It was super slow.
Nothing was happening.
And we were like, this is oddly strange.
And there's definitely that thing where it's like, don't anybody say that it's slow because you're fucking yourself like we're cursing everything.
And literally at the stroke of midnight, like it just started popping off and things got really, really crazy right at midnight.
But the very first thing that happened was some guy steps out of his trailer and shoots himself right in his head, just kills himself right in front of his girlfriend.
So we show up on scene and we're all standing there.
And because there's so many of us, it's legitimately like a group of us.
standing around this guy who just did this thing, who obviously was not just having a bad day, but having the worst day of his life to get to the spot where this is what's
happening for him in conjunction with his girlfriend who just witnessed the experience, who's having the worst day of her life.
And we're out there bullshitting and making fun of the experience.
I don't want to say cracking jokes at the person per se, because it wasn't that it was joking about the
It was just like, it was so sad for me.
I was split in that moment of seeing like, where's the humanity that exists?
Because they're all great people.
That was what was really sad too, these men and women that I worked with, like love them to death and I see them from, you know, I feel like I know them really, really well.
And then at the same time, why are we behaving like this?
This is terrible.
And then eventually at some point I started to shift and change that up with what I could control.
Like there were a lot of times where
I stopped arresting people for the bag of dope that they had because I don't care to arrest you for the bag of dope.
Like, you know, you're struggling in life.
Like, let me help you with what I'm able to help you with and still maintain my job.
So it was really, really hard for me.
you would do that?
Would you get in trouble?
get in trouble for doing stuff like that because essentially I did it in such like I didn't do anything like literally just like letting people go right that had committed a
crime but the crime that they committed was they had weed on them or they had a you know, I remember I pulled this guy over once and he had um an empty baggie on his leg.
He had panicked so much in me walking up to the car that in the effort to try to like panic and hide everything and he knew who I was.
Because I had arrested him before I walk up and I'm standing there and I'm talking to him and I see this little baggie and it was empty.
It was an old baggie, but it was sitting on his leg.
And that's enough for a police officer to at least pull that guy out of the car and start searching the vehicle.
He's probably going to go to jail for something at that point, right?
And because I knew that he lived right where he was at and everything, he wasn't driving anymore.
He was home.
I just happened to time at all to where it was pulling him over at that spot.
And at that moment, I just let him go.
I'm not going to arrest him for some empty paraphernalia.
Do you know what I mean?
That was that kind of stuff that I just started shifting and changing because it was silly.
It wasn't helping or serving anybody.
This guy needed help.
He needed somebody to talk to.
And a lot of what ended up happening to me as well was I'd end up on suicidal calls and talking to people during those time periods and really getting um
Like I was grateful that I was in some of those moments and some of those experiences to be able to kind of like be the person at that spot trying to connect with them in an
emotional way.
Not all officers were that way.
So I was grateful for some of those, but not all of those worked out the way that they should have worked out.
So it was also, you know, to a detriment at times where I'd show up and I was too late and then you're dealing with the fallout after the fact and so many different things.
But I wasn't helping anybody doing what I was doing.
And at the same time, I was like,
just dying inside.
I love your concept of one day on, two days off or something, or just be a police officer for some short amount of time.
Yeah, I don't think they should do any more than like three or five years on the road.
And during that time period, it should be short shifts with huge recovery time because your nervous system never recovers.
You're already pegged out.
Your nervous system is already always activated.
Even when you're off duty, it's always on.
Right.
And then you're always dealing in the extremes of like adrenal fatigue and failure and
Yeah.
why addiction and caffeine and so many different things become such a massive issue for police officers, because obviously they're just trying to cope.
But it's emblematic of society.
That's the other thing too, right?
Like all the things that police officers use to cope and manage their stresses are the same things that we're turning around arresting people for.
It's so silly.
It's so asinine.
Yeah.
it's a hamster wheel with no end.
It's just going to, there's no time when you're like, okay, we did the job or we finished it or the project's over.
It's just on.
uh There's no, there's no, yeah, we did it.
That never is going to come.
So you either learn how to settle into that, that this is it.
And there is no, there is no report card.
There is no anything.
It's just, this is what we're doing and either you can do that.
and suffer the consequences or- You've gotta shut down.
You tune out the world.
It's fight or flight.
Go on vacation.
So what did you do after you were like, oh.
I fell apart.
really, truthfully, just fell apart.
I went into deep depression, um drank heavily, used to go down and buy beer thinking I was just going outside to mow the lawn, but I would kill tons of beer all the time.
Got really drunk all the time.
Just went into deep depression.
As far as like what I was doing as a job or as a career or what was my next move, right?
All of this time period too.
Like there's a whole other parallel.
uh
almost a parallel uh storyline in conjunction with all of this that involves me also waking up into the space of like spirituality and energy healing and really having massive
experiences uh in my personal life that then are translating into my um professional life as a police officer.
So I'm essentially having like my spiritual awakening as a police officer basically.
And I'm experiencing things um
learning about things, uh literally having like all the spiritual experiences that people have, and then getting to experience those in real world scenarios with as a police
officer.
So it was this really cool but also like massive transitory time period for me.
So in conjunction with all of that, like you know in my downtime I'm getting certified to be a theta healer going through the process of
learning theta healing, which is just an energy healing modality.
And I'm starting to do like little weekend fairs and events and starting to do energy readings and things like that, working with people in that capacity, really enjoying that,
really like jiving with that and feeling that.
And then also being a police officer and.
I can't imagine.
They do not align at all.
Two totally different worlds.
You had a foot in two totally different worlds.
Yeah.
and I was constantly trying to blend them.
was trying to bring forth all of that.
Essentially, I got to a spot and it's the same spot that I'm at today where I get to the spot with spirituality and with energy and everything like that where it's all just love.
For me, it's just all love.
We're all love.
We're connected to love.
That's what the whole big game is all about.
It's just a big fucking love fest.
This is love.
It's what we're experiencing.
So I try to bring that.
to being a police officer, which means I'm starting to see people more and trying to help people more and really want to invest the time and energy to see these people and help
these people rather than just arrest these people or do you know what mean?
It was really kind of like trying to transition and shift in that.
And it's not, I mean, that's not what a police officer's job is.
That's not what, yeah.
Utah.
Maybe down here in Southeast Florida, we probably have resource officers that go and do different things and, you know, the area's flush with cash.
But in small town Utah, I don't think that's happening, right?
It's enforcement.
uh
it's not the role that uh of a police officer, but I'm trying to do it in such a way that is like sits with me right, you know, and I could never quite get it to sit with me right.
But I'm also having like just bananas, experiences of like, energetically being able to feel and connect to different things.
And like I used to always go find people.
had a real knack for being able to find people.
And we'd have somebody that
needed to be found because they needed to be arrested or they were a suspect in something and I would just go out and find them.
I would just get in my patrol car and feel whichever way I was supposed to go and turn left here and turn right there and then I think I'd better turn around and go in the
opposite direction.
And it happened so much so that like my sergeant got to the point where he just would kind of chuckle because we'd come in on shift and they'd be like, yeah, we're looking for
so-and-so.
And I'd be like, cool, I'll be back.
I'm gonna go get him.
And he would just laugh because at some point I'd come back in with them.
um
led you to your spiritual path?
Like what led you there to start your spiritual path?
Yeah, what happened was, my mom started uh going to this group that would meet on Monday nights.
It was just a group of women that would meet, and some lady held it at her house, and she taught Theta Healing and everything, but it was more of just a share group for people to
show up and share in the experiences that they were having, learn about meditation, learn about energy healing, learn about oracle cards, all the different things that exist in the
space.
em
So was just kind of like a Monday group thing.
And that was my introduction into it.
And all of it was so like, I was just drinking it all up so much.
was so, so much new information for me on one hand, but then time and time and time again, it was resonating, connecting with things that I had been experiencing my whole entire
life.
So it was a big reawakening process for me of seeing the things and experiencing the things that I had context now to kind of.
frame around rather than thinking, well, that was just a weird thing that would happen when I was a kid.
Oh, wait a minute.
Turns out there's a name for that.
There's something in conjunction with that.
And so it really woke up a lot of things inside of me.
And so I was really hungry for it and kept having cool and cool and cool and cooler experiences with it.
And simultaneously, Steph is also um participating in all of it and coming to the group and we're having shared experiences together.
she's incredibly em energetically gifted and talented.
And so we're having all of these massive, cool, spiritually amazing kind of woke ass experiences together.
And then trying to be a police officer didn't work.
When I.
what your nervous system was like during that time.
it was crazy.
So when I got fired, I rather than like going back to being a police officer or going back and getting some job at the warehouse, manufacturing something or driving a forklift, I
decided I was just going to go all in with with theta healing and with being like a spiritual counselor for people and coaching people in that space and started doing fairs
more consistently and working with people on one on one basis and things like that.
um So that was my game plan, but that, you know, at the same time, I'm horribly depressed.
Life is still just incredibly chaotic and stressful.
All of our kids are at the phase of like teenagers and we're having issues across the board with the other family members, not the other family members, but with, you know,
trying to raise parents with exes and things like not raise parents, raise kids with exes, right?
So we're having issues across the board with all of that stuff.
So.
All of life is crazy.
And I'm trying to do it, I mean, it's not like a, you know, it's not a job.
It's something, it's an entrepreneur thing where you have to like self create and do all sorts of different stuff, which I had no experience in or knowledge.
And eventually this leads me to floating sensory deprivation tanks um because I get really into meditation and I'm wanting to take my spiritual experience or even deeper.
So I start floating.
And then somebody builds a float tank out in Tooele, which was super random.
So they open up a little float tank center out there, which was like bananas, because it's such a unique thing that, you know, there was only one place at the time to do it in Salt
Lake City.
And so.
Yeah, it was really convenient for me.
So I go there and I start essentially floating there, but also build a relationship with the guy.
And he lets me use the back room as a little office space so I can do readings and see clients there and then.
we kind of help run the facility as well a little bit and start working at the float center.
And that transitions into working for the manufacturing company that makes the float tanks.
And then I become the tech for that company and start traveling all over the country, installing float tanks everywhere.
And that's kind of what, at least from a financial perspective and a work kind of angle perspective, that's what I eventually transitioned into and did that for all the way up
until last year.
Okay.
And so for our listeners, what could you describe?
What is Theta Healing?
I thought you were going to say floating and I was like, I'm so ready for floating.
I had to explain floating to so many people.
no, Theta Healing.
So the easiest way to think about it is if you tap in or if you believe that there's something that exists outside of us that we're all connected to, right?
Energy, whatever we want to think about it, right?
Love.
We're all connected to this thing in Theta Healing.
It's just a modality to connect to that stuff.
So it's like anything else like Reiki or um
mediumship or uh psychics or clairaudience.
There's so many different ways of tapping in and connecting to energy, connecting into consciousness.
Theta healing is just one modality to do it.
uh
so would tapping be a theta healing?
No, it's not tapping is its own tapping is it's kind of like its own modality
It's like the tapping's more the reprogramming, reassociation.
like a somatic uh nervous system thing.
It's not necessarily, but yeah.
But same kind of idea.
Theta, example, what I would do when I worked with clients uh is just sit across from them.
And you didn't have to do it this way.
It just kind of helped.
You would just hold hands.
So I put my hands out and they put your hands on my hands.
And then we just sit there for a minute.
And essentially, I connect to your energy and see what's there.
and then I'm just communicating to you what I see, smell, experience, all the various ways that it comes through.
And it can be used for a bunch of different things too.
Do you do medium soup?
Sometimes that will happen in there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's been a, it's been a really long, beautiful journey.
Like I said, there's a parallel storyline of the spiritual awakening process really that's happened in conjunction with my regular everyday life shit falling apart and having to
heal trauma and everything else.
Right.
And, this other component has been, it's been along for the ride all along the way.
And it shows up in a lot of different ways and I've used it in a lot of different ways over the years.
And
I'm now coming back into it even more this last year as well.
It's like finally come back into my space in an even more bigger way as well.
And then in addition to um the floating, there other areas that you applied the theta healing?
Like did you, share it in the festivals and...
um
was I got the job with, I was doing fairs and events and doing readings and things like that.
And then at the same time, I started the podcast that we did originally.
It was called energy is love.
the impetus for that podcast was me interviewing all these people that I was meeting at all of these events and fairs, all the tarot readers, the
Oracle card readers, the people that were into crystals, all the other people that were doing all of these events and fairs.
That was the impetus for the podcast.
so originally, we started that podcast in 2016.
for the first, like, go ahead.
come to a studio where you would interview them or was it remote?
No, it was remote.
was, I mean, it was back in the day where there was, don't think anybody was doing video podcasts at that point.
There might be a little, but it was all audio.
So I had this huge learning curve of like, I invested like 500 bucks and got equipment that I could travel with.
And then I just started going and showing up places and Hey, you want to be on a podcast?
Cool.
I'll come to your house.
And then we hang out and I set up all the equipment and we have a great interview.
And then I go back and edit and record and post and everything.
that's cool.
And how long did you do that podcast?
So we did that podcast.
What happened was I started the podcast and then the first like 100, I think 120, was somewhere around 120 episodes, Steph came on as the co-host and then we did altogether
like 380 episodes of that podcast.
So the first chunk of it, uh I was doing it just by myself.
Steph was on a handful of episodes and
Every time she'd come on, I'd be like, why?
Like I could talk to you obviously all day long.
You just need to do the podcast more.
But I would take all of my gear with me when I would travel for DreamPod.
So I would go and set up a float tank and then coordinate with somebody else that lived in the area that I had like reached out to before ahead of time and then drive over there and
record a podcast with them and then finish up the trip, you know, installing the float tank and then fly back home.
And so I took my gear all over the country and got some really cool interviews with people and
What's cool about it is that you were um interviewing people that were all tied and represented to this healing.
But then also the dream pod, the flotation.
What do you call them?
The float tanks.
They also were tied into that or can be used in that healing, too.
So your whole world was kind of tied to the healing.
Yeah, that's what it came to be was, know, originally, like I said, the impetus was trying to interview people.
I wanted to normalize because there's this woo woo stigma still even today about people that are energy healers and Reiki practitioners and society still sees all of that stuff
from, think, a very negative light, one that they don't really understand, right?
Which I get.
I used to see it that same way, too.
But I wanted to normalize it because they're just everybody's just normal.
Right?
We're just all people.
It's the same thing of working with prisoners.
They're not prisoners.
They're just people.
So I wanted to normalize the experience and bring these people on and have just conversations with them about, you know, not just this cool stuff, but also who they were.
um But then it began to evolve and literally it was basically everything that I was into and interested in.
And it did transition into uh talking to people in the float industry and that were in that space, but they cross over really well because
A lot of people that find their way into floating do so because of meditation or a deeper connection to themselves and to the unknown.
And um Rogan made floating famous when he would talk about it because he was an avid floater.
So there was a lot of crossover um with floating and with psychedelics.
And then that eventually transitioned because again, it was just what my lived experience was.
Basically, I was talking to people.
that I was interested in based off of what I was interested in.
And eventually it led into men's work and mental health and men's emotional work because one of the really big things that saved me was I got involved with a men's organization in
2017 and went on this week-long backpacking trip that was a men's retreat into Yellowstone.
And that was like a really big shift trajectory moment for us in our relationship as well as just in my life because
I had so much repressed, everything that I wasn't dealing with and wasn't processing and didn't know how to process it.
And in the meantime, our relationship is just falling apart.
And it was so difficult and so challenging.
And I was out mowing the lawn and I was listening to Joe Rogan and there was a guy that was on his name's Dan Doty.
And he was talking about this new men's organization that he was starting called Everyman.
and he was explaining the focus of Everyman and what it was and I was like, this is what I fucking need.
He's describing what I'm wanting.
Like if I could create something for myself, this guy's talking to me about it right now.
And he's talking about this Yellowstone expedition that they're having, you know, in the fall.
And I'm like, man, I would love to go on this expedition.
I have like a massive, massive love and respect for Yellowstone.
It was like...
If it wasn't California family vacation when I was growing up, then it was Yellowstone.
We went to Yellowstone a ton.
So I've got really, really good memories in Yellowstone.
So it became this huge moment in my life where I wanted to go on this thing, but at the time I wasn't working.
we, you know, I had credit card.
It was like we didn't have any money.
Steph was basically our sole income.
She was still working as a dispatcher.
And I talked to her about this thing and I was like, yeah, they have this retreat.
It would be kind of cool, but obviously it's not a thing.
It's not going to happen.
I go back outside and mow the lawn.
Well, she's inside calling like the credit card company and really figuring out what our debt was.
And she even got the balance moved up.
So suddenly we had an extra chunk of money in there because the trip was like 4,500 bucks or something like that in order to do the whole week long inclusive event.
So she made it so that I could go to this thing.
And she came out and she said, hey,
If you want to go, you can go.
Here's the money.
And I'm like, I'm going.
And then that really, really shifted and transitioned things because suddenly I had a, not just an outlet, but uh I had a space where I could feel and connect and process.
And I had a container to do it in.
And I came home from that retreat and started a men's group in Salt Lake that met every Sunday for like four years.
We met all the way up since then up and through COVID and everything.
Wow.
That's cool.
up a huge chunk of my life to where I started practicing emotional awareness, emotional intelligence, connecting, feeling, bringing emotions into my body and sitting with them
and being with them and doing it with other men and helping other men do it.
over the years, yeah, I was lucky enough to go to a bunch of their everyman events and went on the backpacking trip again as a, you know, I went back
the next year and helped with it and went through their whole training program that they eventually rolled out and was assisting at different events and things like that.
So I really just dove headfirst into that because it was saving me so much and it was healing me so much.
the premise there in terms of making it men only?
So it's a safe space for men to go and just talk about the challenges we face as guys and the feelings and emotions and all of that?
Yeah, I think the one of the things that really stood out to me about Everyman because it's not, em it wasn't, you it's not a, it's not a new thing.
The concept and idea of a men's retreat and men's group and things like that.
It's been around for a really long time, obviously.
So, but what really appealed to me was the emotional side of it, where it wasn't, um it wasn't like uh a week long retreat where you're going to be out there doing a bunch of guy
stuff and then kind of like
or something.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It wasn't that type of bonding experience.
It was structured and framed around the emotional healing part of it and slowing down in a group and just sitting and processing and connecting and communicating.
So quite literally what the men's group would look like was, you know, we'd show up and we'd sit in a circle and everybody, if they chose, it's very similar to AA uh and in some
regards.
just in format in a sense, right?
So we would basically check in and you get to check in and depending upon your day and what you're going through, you just get to share it and get to be heard and get to be
validated and get to be seen.
And just having that space created and the ability to show up and do it week after week with each other, you get more and more comfortable, more and more vulnerable, more and
more stuff comes up.
And it's a really healing environment when it's done right and when it's done in a healthy way.
as part of that, have you been able to deal with some of the, say the trauma from your dad and your upbringing with your brothers and your dad?
Yeah, yeah, that was a real big part of the first few years of being involved with that.
So that's all like 2017, 2018, 2019, right?
And that was a big chunk of what I was healing, was processing was all the wounds that I had around masculinity, all the wounds that I had around my dad.
I had a lot of misplaced anger and frustration that should have been in some ways placed upon my dad because he was such a non-existent in my life, essentially, right?
It just fell onto my oldest brother.
And so I go from seeking all the love and validation that I would need and or want from my dad not getting and then just placing all of that on my brother.
And he can't meet that in any ways, right?
It's a role that he's not meant to meet at all.
so then I come to despise him and hate him and get really bitter and angry towards him.
um But yeah, all of that unpacking process of
yeah.
really the masculine wound and the father wound and the energy in that space is what a big chunk of that processing was.
So then you, did you get that out of the Everyman event or over the next four years in the men's group?
I guess it probably never stops, right?
Yeah, I mean, I was so involved with it where if I wasn't doing the men's group on Sundays, then it was like every few months I was traveling to some other because they
would do mini events to, know, they would do like a weekend in Joshua Tree or um all these other little mini events that I would go and if I was able to and I was able to go to a
lot of them because it was neither in conjunction where I would already be there because I was traveling for DreamPod.
Or I got so accustomed to traveling like I remember like if you don't travel, then travel is kind of like a big deal and it's money and it's cost and it's all of this stuff.
But when you travel for a living, I mean, it's fucking normal.
So I got so accustomed to traveling that it was really easy for me to, I'm just sleeping in another hotel, renting another car, going to another expedition, driving over here and
going to this and.
I just, I think this is so important.
um I think this is so needed.
I would love to see this started and maybe it does exist, but it's not talked about enough for younger men.
The Gen Z's um start early.
And I think a lot of us Gen X parents have worked really hard.
and done different with our kids and help them with their emotional development and given them names for their emotions and given them space to talk and express.
So I think we've all tried to break the cycle.
But I still think it would be incredibly amazing to have a support system like this for the young men and especially before they enter into marriage, before they enter into these
commitments because you probably wouldn't see as many issues within a marriage.
if the work has already been done ahead of time.
And I'm sure that you have a lot of the men that you've encountered are avoidants, I would assume, right?
Are you dealing with a lot of avoidants who are having to learn to sit with their feelings, figure it out, not run away, not avoid, because that's why so many of their
relationships have fallen apart or been strained because their avoidants.
Have you found that?
100%.
100%.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I look at it because my, not just my own personal understanding of it, but also my own lived experience of it.
And then also kind of like, it's been the thing that has been so prevalent in my space for such a significant amount of time now where I'm thinking about it.
I'm processing, I'm talking about just like inner work and emotional work and you know, it's, it's, it's what has been really shaping the last probably decade of my life, if I'm
honest.
And what's really interesting is, think that, because I get really bummed out by how men are still so resistant to this whole concept and idea that there's a whole other side of
things that they're not addressing and dealing with, and how detrimental it is.
Like, it's hard not to see the state of everything through this lens of emotional immaturity is what it is.
and it's lack of ability to communicate and express emotions.
And there's a hundred reasons why it exists, right?
And there's a hundred reasons why we're all programmed this way.
And all of those things are really, really big deals that will slowly change as time changes.
Like you said, as Gen X, I feel like Gen Z and these earlier generations now are so much more adept at communicating and expressing emotions.
and normalizing the emotional experience and supporting each other in their emotions than we ever were growing up.
So I think it's changing, but it would be nice if there was some big, massive shift in change.
And even if it's just the normalization of, we're all emotionally immature.
And this is what it looks like to go from emotionally immature to emotionally mature.
And there's no judgment or criticism.
It's just an understanding of growth and development.
And it's a part of development that we all have to go through.
And it's basically stunted at the get-go.
This emotional maturity just gets cut off at the knees, basically.
just as young boys and individuals, it's not even boys, right?
All of us to some extent.
But as soon as you start expressing emotion as a young boy, it gets shut off.
It gets shut down.
And it's really, really sad.
It is.
It does make me feel very sad um because that space and I will say even as a Gen Xer, I was especially with my first son, I was not in tune with that at all.
mean, I'm way more aware now.
So my my second son is definitely getting more of the benefit.
And of course, with my daughter, there was always space for her because she's a girl.
It's just natural that to give girls space.
for their emotions, it just is.
And so I've learned just through parenting from my 28 year old son to my 15 year old son, I've learned the change.
So even though we're trying to change, we're still slow going.
You're an elder millennial.
I think the elder millennials and the millennials have taken it even further than Gen X did.
And I do think that, I hope that the Gen Z women,
will expect more from their Gen Z men counterparts and almost kind of raise the standards of this is what I expect of you.
This is what I need.
And then they have to kind of rise to the occasion and hope hopefully with some of the tools we've all given them, they can.
I think they have more of a chance than any generation of men yet.
Before them for sure.
Yeah.
I've been really surprised, like, because I've, you know, I sat in a lot of men's groups over the years and got to sit, not just in the local group that uh we had in Salt Lake,
but all these other groups.
I've met men all across the country in various age ranges and groups and everything like that.
Some men that would come to these retreats were, you know, 60s, 70s, 80s year old men that would come.
And then you'd have like 20 year old guys and younger guys in their 20s that are coming to the event.
And even uh so my oldest is 26 and her husband is I think a year or two older and even like they have such a different understanding of emotional maturity than I do.
And it's like it boggles my mind sometimes because I really had to like open up my eyes and learn from the experience of the way that they see things and do things isn't wrong.
It isn't, you know, some, you know, the
The way that I think we often portray younger generations is a way to make it comfortable for us because we can't deal with the truth of what they're saying.
yeah, and they've really opened up my eyes a lot.
So I have a lot of hope for the world and for the level of emotional maturity that is continuing to evolve across the board with men and women.
And it's still something that we need way more work on.
100%.
So your podcast that you had before, in addition to talking about healing, did you talk about um these men groups?
Did you have them on too?
Or anyone from?
I did.
So I had all of those guys, like the founder of the organization became a close friend of mine, Dan Doty.
So he was on the podcast a handful of times.
em I used to bring on, I mean, all the guys that were in group, I used to take my gear with me.
Like we recorded some episodes on site, like during an event, during a retreat with, em we did an episode once in a, where there was like four or five of us in this hotel room, just
on microphones talking.
So
I brought all of that to the podcast and there's a lot of that on that old podcast.
And then when Stephanie came on and started co-hosting, then it shifted even again.
And we really went into talking about the healing process of our relationship together and what we were navigating together at the same time, men's group stuff at the same time,
some energy stuff at the same time, just what we were into.
Stephanie eventually left dispatch and became a massage therapist and
started going down a different path.
And so we started sharing our journey and our experience together on the podcast.
So what was your personal you and Stephanie, your personal journey of healing that you guys did together?
Yeah, em in some ways it's basically what has shaped our relationship.
We both have trauma in our background um from childhood that's really significant.
So we had to heal that trauma, but had zero awareness of the depth of it.
And through the course of our relationship, where you were able to really navigate that process of essentially enduring through the shit that uh got brought up, right?
I think every relationship goes, you know, after the honeymoon phase and then you kind of settle into life.
then usually around that like five, six, seven year mark is when all of your shit and all of your patterns are still showing up consistently and creating a whole bunch of chaos and
stress and they're not changing and they're not being addressed.
And then you think there's something wrong with the other person and then there's something wrong with that person.
then relationship ends up falling apart or it doesn't.
And ours didn't.
And we were able to.
stick through all of it and really buckle down into the space of actually healing this thing together.
And getting into the men's work and with Everyman and everything like that was a big catalyst for it because it was the first time that I really started being accountable.
And that was a huge shift and change.
Up until that point, I had avoided accountability at all costs.
um I was still...
operating from a place of um trying to literally just outrun all of the chaos that I had experienced and all of the things that I had done and doing everything that I could to
basically literally just not take accountability for it.
And then I had to start that process.
And that was like a learning curve in and of itself, right?
I felt like the emotional going from emotionally immature to mature is this maturing process that I had to go through.
which required me to start taking accountability.
And all along the way Steph's doing her own healing as well in the ways that resonate with her and she's finding outlets and women retreats and the equivalent of those things.
And we're each kind of like incrementally trying to heal together and work on our relationships and repair our relationship.
But then our stuff is still kind of getting in the way of it.
So it's like two steps forward.
you know, three steps back because we might quote unquote think we're fixing a problem that we're experiencing in our relationship, but we didn't really fix the root of the
problem.
So it ends up happening again and popping up again and just navigating all of those kind of things that happen in relationships.
But ours almost felt more, I don't necessarily more intense or anything like that, but yeah, just really intense.
A lot of shit.
We have awareness to make it intense.
If you weren't aware, it wouldn't have felt so intense.
Yeah, I think that's a really key thing there too, you know, there's, for a long time, I thought our relationship was fine, that there wasn't anything wrong with the relationship.
And then, oh, you start to have awareness of there's issues, and then you start to have awareness of maybe I'm contributing to those issues and to those factors.
And then you really like, you rip that bandaid off, and you're like, shit, I got to take responsibility for my side 100%.
And...
Yeah, well, you guys had the symptoms, but then you needed to get to the root of what was causing.
And when you said accountability, that was the other thing I was going to say is I think that's tied in to em young men's emotional growth is lack of accountability.
Would you say in general with and with men in general?
Yeah.
I think it goes back.
mean, because I've done so much work on.
what happened was, you know, now we're kind of caught up to therapy and finding these therapists to work with.
And em because of all the float tank stuff and the podcasting stuff, I learned about Rick Doblin, who is the founder of Maps, which is the organization responsible for getting
MDMA.
uh approved through um the FDA.
So it's a legal sanction, you know, whole nine yards thing.
And he's been on this like lifelong journey of trying to literally just get this fricking drug that's going to save millions and has saved a lot of people approved.
uh I got the opportunity to interview him on the podcast.
So that is like massively in my space.
And I'm like, OK, that sounds like something that sounds like medicine that's going to be really, really helpful for me.
But how, you know, at the time,
MAPS is still doing and they still are doing um clinical studies and you have to be involved on the you know it's not the type of thing where you just go and show up and
you're like okay give me the ecstasy I'm ready for the healing and so we found some therapists who were they had gone through the process of they were basically in the
pipeline of getting certified through MAPS and becoming uh facilitators that are approved through their training program and everything like that so that they can offer this
service.
when it becomes legalized.
And part of what that process is, is they're trying to do it on the back end, kind of behind the scenes in a under the table kind of way, because it's not legal.
So we just happen to find really, really good therapists who were legit therapists.
And we would like see them from nine to five and have regular therapy sessions.
And then on the weekends, they would come out to our house and sit with us for like eight hours.
And like I said, we would take turns where
If it was my Saturday, Steph would take off for the day.
She'd take her kids.
They'd go see a movie.
They'd be gone for the day.
And the therapist would show up.
And we'd sit there at the house for like eight hours while I'm dosing and going through this experience.
And because we worked with them for so long, um knew like they...
Because all MDMA does, and it's not to say all that it does, it does a lot of different things, but...
Essentially, it just lets down the wall that is between you and all of your shadow and all of your trauma.
And it makes all of that stuff much easier to uh experience because it's like the MDMA almost keeps your nervous system regulated in a calm state so that you're not so activated
when you're processing through the things that are coming up.
So it really gives you the opportunity to process through traumas and process through experiences.
And in my case, it was a lot of repressed things that I hadn't, um that I had repressed.
And in conjunction with that, I was able to uncover things from childhood and really put pieces together that like started not fixing, but suddenly I understood why I was the way
that I was.
And it started making sense.
And it was massive.
I mean, it was so life-changing because
it quite literally just shifted my perception of my entire life.
And now I had to go back from, you know, and even before birth, because a lot of what uh I think healing also involves is like the epigenetic aspect of it and seeing, you know, how
things repeat and patterns repeat and cycles repeat and the experiences that get passed down to you energetically as well as emotionally and genetically and all sorts of
different things.
uh I had to put a lot of pieces together and now I had
almost like a clear lens to do it with.
So that's what the journey's been like since then is putting childhood and putting teenage years and putting adulthood and reframing everything with this new understanding of what
really took place for me and what happened and has changed everything.
OK, so what I was going to ask, when you're in the therapy, do the therapists, how do they know what to ask you to take to guide you on that journey for those eight hours?
Yeah, think that uh that's why it's really important to work with people that you know and trust.
It's the type of thing where, you know, especially my therapist, I wasn't as connected to Steph's therapist.
They worked in conjunction with each other.
It was a man and a woman.
I think that's an important thing as well.
And that's part of the protocol as well that MAPS rolls out in conjunction with it.
There's a thing that happens when essentially you've got
Yes, you've got two therapists that are supporting each other in a space, depending upon what the patient needs in the moment, right?
Sometimes it might be a really difficult, challenging experience.
so it's almost like they're there so that they have an extra set of hands.
But in my case, a lot of what it was was uh the cool part was they come to represent masculine and feminine energy.
So it's important to have those mirrors almost uh in the space available to you.
And when you're
in the, you when you're going through the process of it and everybody's experience is different.
That's one thing that we really kind of chuckled about after the fact, few years after the fact, because it's not so much chuckling in the moment, but Steph's experience was very,
different than mine.
Mine was just a lot of like hanging out and relaxed and just like, I'm so happy, like my therapist, I won't say his name, but uh we'll call him John.
I was just like, John, I'm so happy to see you.
Like, you're so cool.
I'm so glad you're here.
I just love hanging out with you, Johnny.
Be like, yeah, yeah, I get it.
Yeah, it's nice.
It's nice.
Anyways, let's talk about this little bit, right?
So oftentimes for me, it was just some kind of gentle nudging.
And, and then when it finally kind of, when it opens up, then it's just kind of like literally just being there validating rather than really guiding anything.
You're just assisting the person through the experience that they're having so that they're not trying to experience it alone.
essentially is what it boils down to.
So they have kind of established history from you going to therapy with them long enough that they know what.
story.
He knows my issues.
He knows what you know has been coming up for me and just like anything else.
I think you know, that's why I think therapy is so beneficial to some extent, right?
I think there's limits to what regular talk therapy can and can't do but oftentimes it's you know, you're unpacking things and you're bringing things up and a good therapist is
going to help you kind of look at things that you haven't really been able to see before.
So there was already stuff that was kind of
you know, processing and coming up and understanding.
And then once that wall goes down where you don't have the added layer of fear and association with it anymore, and you're just relaxed enough, then it's much easier to go
towards those things.
So some of the areas that might be a little too um shadowed in a sense, or too difficult to go through during a regular therapy session, he might be thinking about that, you know,
having that in his back pocket to some extent.
But it's really an experience that happens in the moment.
you know, who knows where it's going to go or who knows what's going to come up.
I started out thinking that a lot of what I was going to be processing was stuff with Stephanie and I and really healing some of the things with our relationship.
And next to nothing, like next, we even did a session together with each other where we were both dosed and our therapists were there.
And it was like, we're going to try to do a couple's session now under and it didn't work.
wasn't
helpful or beneficial for either of us uh because
just seem to work on your own stuff.
And that's what was causing the problem within the relationship.
100%.
And I think that's the case for everybody.
It's like everything that we tried to do, as I mentioned earlier, right, you can't really fix your relationship if you're not fixing yourself and addressing yourself because those
are the issues that are affecting the relationship.
So this was the opportunity for both of us to get to the heart of our issues.
And it just looked very, very different.
Steph had a much different experience than mine.
What is the format?
Do they come over?
Are you laying in bed?
Or is it like you're hanging out in the living room type of thing?
How does that kind of go down the mechanics of it?
For like, if it was more of a, like if we went to an office, I'm sure it would be much different.
I know that like if, when it comes to the clinical studies that they do with MAPS that are in a much more kind of controlled environment, then it's more of like a therapeutic
setting and you might have a couch or you might have something for the person to lay down on and relax.
You'll have, you you're creating a soft, quiet, nice, relaxing environment for them.
As far as what it was for us, I mean, that was just our house.
So we, I,
set up our living room and, you know, created a nice little quiet environment for myself where I felt safe and comfortable, which is easy because it's my house.
And then the therapists are just coming into it.
And for Stephanie, she was upstairs in one of our bedrooms upstairs because that's where she felt safe doing it, you know.
So we lucked out and we didn't have to try to do it in an environment that we weren't comfortable in.
Our therapists came into that space with us.
And the dosing, um I'm assuming it's way different than recreational dosing, right?
No, it's so well it is and it is and it isn't.
That's what was funny too about the experience was because it wasn't um because it was kind of like off the books in a sense.
Our therapists didn't bring the drugs with them, right?
They're like we can do this thing, but you got to figure out how to uh get what you need to get for this thing.
And we're like, okay.
And they even had referrals for us.
So they're like, you could call this guy.
So we legit end up
ah We just had a drug dealer.
We had this cool drug dealer hippie guy that we were hooked up with that we would call and text and then go and meet him.
And it was super sketchy.
It was so funny to be doing it, having the experience of being a police officer, watching people do that thing.
And then here I am like five years later, six years later, navigating the opposite end of the spectrum.
was so funny for me.
that was kind of like the, what's that?
Where were you guys living at the time?
Okay.
And so did the, did the therapist then look at what you received recreationally and decide how much you should take or did you guys decide?
they had recommendations as far as like, here's the recommended dosage.
So they gave us like protocols and um like how to take it, when to take it, how much to take.
And, you know, it's kind of the type of thing where you start out slower and find where you're like the proper doses for you, depending upon.
So I took different amount than Stephanie took.
so, yeah.
How many sessions did you guys do?
I think altogether I did, I want to say four or five sessions.
It might have only been three or four too.
There's so much of it that because of the, um, the amount of like healing and processing that's taking place, I don't have clear memories of hard facts.
I never really do.
My memory tends to work in a much more kind of abstract way.
So I feel like it was three or four sessions and, and then an end of, and then a
group session as well.
So we did the couple session which was, it was fun but it wasn't, you know, we didn't solve any great mysteries that day.
And then did you guys continue to do your own therapy separate from these sessions like that you were doing before?
yeah, in between the sessions, we would still maintain uh appointments and weekly appointments and stuff like that.
So altogether, it was over a year of doing this type of work with our therapists where it would be, you know, weekly calls, weekly group, not group, but individual sessions.
And then every few months when it was time and it felt appropriate based upon where we were at, then, OK, let's get it scheduled.
We can do this.
the third Friday next month and then they would come out to the house and we would do a session.
And then were you done after that and you guys were good?
Like did you resolve pretty much what you were trying to resolve?
Yeah, we healed it all.
We're 100 % healed.
We fixed it.
We're all squared away now.
um Turns out it just took a year of MDMA and now we're all fixed.
uh In some ways, yes, we are.
We're completely different than we were before all of that.
It really was a huge catalyst moment for both of us and started us down a completely different path of healing where we had to...
It's almost like before we were trying to survive and now we got to the spot where
by seeing and recognizing and experiencing all the things and seeing our life now through a different lens and a different perspective.
Now it was like, I I'm going to change my life and create the life that I want to create, which is basically what we've been doing from that point on.
it was, it was the reason why we moved.
Um, it was a big catalyst for us moving and getting out of that city and getting out of that town.
um, I needed to get away from my mom.
needed to move.
And so it was.
it opened the door to your authentic life.
Very much so.
That's a good way to say it.
yeah.
And so what made you choose Tennessee?
It was really random.
came time to like the decision.
We made the decision that we were going to sell our house and move.
at the time, the housing market in Utah was just exploding.
It was like during that really crazy time where, you know, you'd hear stories of like people showing up with briefcase full of cash and, you know, they're paying you hundreds
of thousand dollars over your asking price.
And we barely caught the tell end of that.
So we were able to make a nice chunk of change off of our house.
But it was at the end when everything was starting to really crash.
So we listed our house and then just kind of over the months watched the price continue to drop, which meant we went from wanting to live in Oregon and Washington and Colorado and
stay out West.
And as the housing market continued to lower and we kept lowering the price of the house, we're like, well, now we got to look East.
And I had some friends that had moved out here to Tennessee and they liked it.
And we knew we didn't want to go to snow and we knew that we didn't want, um, like have to deal with hurricanes and stuff like that.
Stephanie was like, I don't want to deal with hurricanes.
I don't want to deal with tornadoes and we don't want to deal with crazy ass winters.
Cause we were tired of winters from spending our whole life in Utah.
And so Tennessee was kind of on the map, but truthfully, I was looking all over the country every morning.
I would wake up and drink coffee and search for housing.
And you know, we wanted a little bit of land and we wanted a nice house and we wanted to be.
you know, half hour, 40 minutes from some big city, but we didn't want to live in a city.
We wanted to live a little bit more like we're accustomed to.
We like living out in rural small town area where it's quiet and peaceful.
So.
part of your life, though, that you could wake up in the morning, make coffee and be like, where do we want to live?
I mean, that's so cool.
Yeah, that's such a unique experience.
it really was and it is and I'm getting to the point because it's a few years out now where I can see it through that lens.
But truthfully, it was all trauma.
It was so hard.
It was such a life change because we went from COVID and COVID changed everything for us on one hand.
I went from traveling and being on the road two or three times a month to not.
So suddenly I was home all the time, which meant
all the shit that we had not really been addressing and facing and processing and dealing with.
Now we had to face it and process it and deal with it and enter in all the therapy.
And then as soon as the therapy kind of like reached its catalyst point, then it was like, we're getting the hell out of here and we're moving.
I have to get out of this city.
And so it was really, really traumatic time for us.
We had to put down a dog.
uh When Stephanie and I met, she had a dog.
Her name was Angel.
And Angel was, I mean, her name fit perfectly.
She was just the most incredible dog ever.
And she hung on and hung on and hung on.
she was 18 years old when we finally, it was like she would not go.
She was a pit.
Yeah.
Yeah, she was just, she's.
She's probably, even though I love my Huskies and I can like hear my Huskies in the background, like, don't say she's your favorite.
She was just so special and so magical.
And so we had to put her down.
We had to like completely remodel our house in order to sell it.
We had bought in this old kind of like Victorian style house that this old couple had built as their dream house.
So every room was like different carpeting and wallpaper and different paint and
crazy light fixtures and it was just this really weird house that we learned like we fell in love with and really loved.
But when it came time to sell it, like it's a you know, it's such a weird house to sell.
the real estate agent was like, you guys should probably paint and get some carpet.
So that meant like stripping wallpaper.
So every day it was painting and repairing.
And so it was just a super chaotic experience on top of also leaving our entire family.
We both grew up there.
all of our friends, all of our family, our daughters.
So it was just horrendous.
And then coming here, essentially we were just in like this survival state for a year of after we moved here because everything was so new and so raw and we were still so in the
state of just healing and really repairing and recovering.
So it's taking us a while to really settle into this space and start to feel comfortable, but slowly
Are you there now?
yeah, we're almost there.
We're getting closer and closer to the spot where it's just like, we really love Tennessee.
There's so many things about it that are incredible and amazing.
um And then it's kind of like we've made peace with, you know, not being able to see our daughters as much as we would like.
We flew them out last year when our son graduated high school and we flew all the girls out for a week and
got to see graduation together and kind of palled around.
We went on vacation with essentially with them here in Tennessee, which was really fun.
But that's a really hard component is not being able to just see our kids.
Absolutely.
did they live in the same town as you guys before you left?
they didn't live in Grantsville anymore.
All the girls lived in Salt Lake.
so they were, you know, they all had their own lives and were doing their own things, but we still saw them all the time.
Do you know what mean?
Consistently were hanging out and running around.
the biggest challenge, I would think.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, it really was all of our like extended family and friends and things like that, you know, that's That's kind of just like okay.
Yeah, this is the phase of life where we're moving.
We're gonna miss everybody by And then some like I didn't have as much of a hard time with my family because I've really I've really distanced myself from my family because of the
toxicity in the way that I see it all now and So it wasn't really difficult for me
on one hand, then there's also just been tons of still emotional processing that I constantly am navigating and trying to get through.
Was that the catalyst really in the move?
that your healing is only going to go so far and um maybe not even take full route if you stayed there?
If you stayed there, you needed to literally physically move away.
Yeah, I really think so.
A sense it's, you know, at the time I didn't, uh, I wouldn't have been able to kind of like articulate it this way, but since then it's really clear to me that it's, it's kind
of the adage of like, you, you can't heal in the environment that you were hurt in.
You have to get out of that environment in order to start healing from it.
And I was just so enmeshed in all of it that I couldn't see, you know, and Stephanie is the same way she.
has her own journey and her own path and the things that she's uncovered and processed and um everything that she's gone through.
And it's the same thing where there was just shadows everywhere we went from everything, from my childhood, from our relationship, from my time as a police officer.
We're still living in the same area in the community and everything like that.
So it was just so much to kind of continually try to have to carry and bear the weight of that.
You know, it almost seems like the only way that we would have gotten through it is if we got out of it.
It was a uh true unpacking.
Yeah, it was true unpacking.
it.
And honestly, kudos to you two for having the courage to do it because so many people don't.
And the fact that you took that step.
And I think that, again, is such a great example to those of us who are in our 40s and in our 50s and are in our 60s that you're still living life like life is happening.
It's still a high quality, authentic life.
It's a you can thrive, you can continue to thrive as you age.
It's up to you, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally.
But a lot of times that thriving requires to be uncomfortable, know, being uncomfortable is what's going to create that growth.
And I just think you guys are such a great example of continuing to do that.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
And it's been very uncomfortable.
Yeah, honestly, and leaving your kids.
That's like the hardest thing ever.
Right.
But you're such a great example to them.
know.
a big, I mean, that's always been, ever since I've had kids, that's always been kind of like a North Star for me, is it's like, I understood that the way that we all learn is
just by seeing, right?
We mirror our parents, we learn by watching.
And if there's things that I really would want my kids to choose for themselves and to experience in their life, the best way for me to hopefully ensure that that happens, or at
least set them up for that to happen,
is go first, give them something to see and something to mirror.
And that was a yeah, a thing that helped when it was really, really hard.
And I believe it wholeheartedly.
And we see like that trickle down effect with our kids now.
And I'm sure we'll continue to see it em as they continue to grow up and get older and older, right?
Cause they're all...
They're all in their 20s right now and they're making decisions and they're seeing life in certain ways and they're starting to experience all of those fun things that you
experience at that phase where you start to make decisions about how you want your life to go.
And we hope that we've given them more, like there's more that exists, right?
You don't just have to stay stuck in Utah.
You don't just have to still do this thing.
You're not, you know, stuck in this place just because that's where you were born.
Yeah, if they're going to truly believe that there's many chapters to their journey, we have to show them we are continuing with our chapters, you know, that we're not getting
stuck in one chapter.
We have to be the example of modeled behavior of that.
And um because they are going to get out of their 20s, their 20s is when their frontal lobe closes.
Right.
So there's so much going on there.
And then they are going to enter into their 30s and really look around.
And um and I think it is our responsibility to continue to show them.
No matter how old you get, life continues on.
And I think our I think our our generation Gen X and I millennial are the first two generations that will show that because the generations before us kind of accepted this.
Not all everyone, but in general, kind of accepted this.
Now we settle down.
Now we sit in our lazy boy.
Now we sit on the porch and we kind of just wait.
And we're all saying, fuck that.
I feel like we're living more now than.
we have in yours.
Yeah, honestly.
Yeah, I feel like that's what we're entering into.
Like when we turned 40, Steph's a year older than I am.
And so we kind of, you know, match each other in progression to some extent.
But it really feels like we're at a phase of life now where we're entering into the best part of it.
Like this is when things start to get really exciting because we're not fucked up anymore.
Like we have such awareness now where we're not recreating patterns of chaos and turmoil.
And we also haven't just given up that we're like, well, this is it.
We're just going to hang out and, you know, this is life.
We're really excited by life and what's coming next.
And, you know, we're doing all of these things that we're passionate about.
And that's exciting.
We're choosing to live an authentic life, but we're being the example of that.
Instead of just talking about it, we're saying, look, we're doing it.
Like we're living our authentic life.
And I think it's so important that we all keep talking about it because that's the only way it's going to spread.
And to show people it's completely acceptable and OK.
I'm sorry.
Did you want to say something?
No, I'm just curious.
Do you think it was those MDMAs?
or ecstasy sessions that really was the breakthrough for both of you individually and then together.
Sounds like that really was a breakthrough.
Yeah, it really was.
like, it's it's I mean, like if you zoom out and, you know, like if we were to look at it from above, there's very much that moment in time.
And then everything after that was different.
It was such a significant awakening, I guess.
I don't even know how you want to, you know, we could frame it and verbalize it and describe it in so many different ways.
But it was a huge transition moment because it was a clear delineation where you could I couldn't
proceed in life now as the way that I had before this because I had the information that I had now.
So it was up to, if I chose to ignore this information now, then I would be choosing to go towards all the pain and suffering again.
It was a very clear decision and action based off of this experience.
So I very much credit the MDMA.
Yeah, there wasn't any going back.
you had full clarity, so there was no going back.
Now, were there any oh other types of microdosing that you guys did or do?
We were doing psilocybin at the same time.
So during that time period, so all along the way we were microdosing psilocybin at the same time.
OK.
So would you do that during the sessions or were you doing doing that like through the week before your session?
Yeah, so we were just doing it all the time.
So we had a protocol for the micro dosing as well.
And each of us took a different amount because again, it's all tolerance based and everything.
And it was just a small amount of psilocybin that we were taking in the form of mushrooms and taking those every day.
But if I remember right, we would do like, I can't remember if we did like three on one off or if we did five on two off, but we would give ourselves a little break.
But it was essentially every day.
for over a year that we were microdosing at the same time.
And that was a really, think that was like, to me, that's a perfect combination that really worked for me, the MDMA and then the microdosing, because the microdosing I feel
based off of not just my experience, but also all the research and the understanding.
And I've listened to like hundreds of hours of podcasts about, you know, the really smart, intelligent people talking about psilocybin and psychedelics and all the things that they
do for us.
And it's helping to repair neural pathways and helping to heal those parts of my brain that were so massively affected by trauma.
And that stuff was much subtler.
And we started to see that and experience that the longer that it was, it was like suddenly it's like literally just your emotional regulation starts to shift and change.
And the ability for me to communicate started to shift and change and like just, yeah, it was just a healing experience across the board.
I really credit both of those things and the psilocybin as well.
And I still use, um I don't use MDMA anymore, but uh I'm still using marijuana a lot from that avenue of the way that it helps me on the healing process.
I use it a lot to process things and it's still a huge advocate.
And then we'll still use um psilocybin, but not in a micro dosing way more than the, we're more dosing with perspective.
We usually do it when we need to do some work.
uh Did you have a lot of experience before this using either marijuana or psilocybin or is this kind of all new?
It was all new.
Yeah.
Growing up, because I grew up in that small little town and because it was the Mormon church and because like, you know, like I didn't even drink alcohol really.
I, you know, dinked around a little bit with alcohol when I was in high school.
Uh, I think I smoked weed once at some party and it was like, I just never had any experience with anything.
And then when marijuana started to get legalized and I was traveling a lot and going to places, I would go up to Portland a lot.
Yep.
Yep.
and started using marijuana like that.
And then they eventually legalized it in Utah for medicinal purposes.
And I went through that process and...
um
like a big deal in Utah.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, I don't.
It's not here.
I don't think it is medicinally psilocybin.
no, not psilocybin.
I know marijuana is, but um I don't know.
Oh, OK.
OK.
Yeah, that's what California, Oregon, Oregon.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So you said you were working at Dream Pods up until last year.
So what did you leave?
No, I got fired from that too.
uh
right?
Before COVID, you were traveling.
before COVID I was traveling a bunch, then all that went away with COVID and it really transitioned to where I structured it so that I was able to just stay home.
So we started doing all the installations remotely and, you know, getting on Zoom calls with clients and, and a lot of what I was doing because obviously cells really tanked when
COVID happened and uh people weren't opening up, you know, float tank centers anymore because it wasn't safe to do that anymore.
And um so a lot of what I ended up doing was just uh customer support.
We had so many clients and customers and stuff.
So I just managed all of North America when it came to support and customer relations and everything like that.
And then all some more backend stuff with the company and everything.
But I got to the point where it was a salaried position and I was just working at home and essentially I just kept cutting back on.
my responsibilities there while we continually grew and evolved into what we're doing today.
Cause we started the podcast, we were doing energy is love together.
Um, we were always trying to like work with each other in some capacity of like coaching and working with people, but we could never quite get it to jive and work together.
Stephanie would work with individuals and I would work with individuals and we always kind of had this path together.
And then
We started doing the podcast together, which then led us into social media and creating more content on social.
And then we started uh during that time period when we did uh MDMA and all of that work.
After that, what came on the heels of that was we went through yoga training, but it was this really in-depth program that this couple put on there, the yoga couple.
um That's their name on social, Matt and Ash.
And it was this really like
literally year-long yoga training that we went through that was really focused on inner work and processing and healing.
So yoga was almost like the thing that we did after we got done doing all this deep emotional work.
So we had another big chunk of healing work that we did with each other through that yoga training.
And we came out of that with
not just yoga as a huge asset, which was really beneficial for our healing because of the somatic effect and being able to get into our bodies and the breathing and the healing of
the body uh really, really started to happen after that process and in conjunction with that process, because that was another big thing that was really lacking.
And I think it's lacking for a lot of people is we think way too much and we don't actually feel enough.
And our bodies are in so much discomfort and pain and
It's communicating things that we often ignore and don't pay attention to and don't listen to.
so yoga helped us slow down and get into our bodies.
And we started working with couples and doing couples coaching and relationship work and all of this kind of stuff in conjunction with the podcast.
And then at the end of, it was after we moved here to Tennessee, it was at the end of 23.
We, I started to have this, um,
I've got a really good connection with my intuition and I've learned how to really lean into it and trust it.
It started all the way back.
I mean, truthfully from childhood, right?
We can always see little moments in time, but I learned to really trust my intuition on why I was a police officer.
And so I built a really good relationship with my gut instinct and trusting that part of my body.
And so when it starts to like fire up and say, Hey, you need to start thinking about this, going towards this, paying attention to this, I learned to trust it.
And at the end of 2023, what happened was I started to get the feeling of like we need to stop doing energy is love and rebrand and do a new show that's still going to be energy is
love.
But we're just going to redesign the set and get some new cameras.
Because at the time we were doing audio and I had a GoPro set up to record video and I wanted like this whole setup.
But in order to get this whole setup, what it entailed was we
ended that podcast and put it to bed.
And then we launched this new show, the Steph & Craig show.
And in order for that to happen, we had to put our house up for sale.
So when we moved here to Tennessee, we were able to not put our house up for sale, refinance our house, because we bought our house when we moved here.
And then a year later, we went and refinanced it to get the equity out of it so that we could build this studio and expand into the new podcast and all of what this has entailed,
which has just been, it's just been crazy for us.
It's cool.
So but why why did they let you go?
From Dream Pod.
Yeah.
I was already basically I had had set it up to where I was doing less and less and less and less things.
And it got to the point where I was like hardly doing anything.
And the guy was finally like, hey, uh yeah, I got to let you go.
And I'm like, I get it.
I had actually wanted to quit in April of that year.
It was last year.
And I chickened out and I didn't quit because financially we were still in a spot where it wasn't feasible.
and he ended up letting me go in July.
So was meant to happen anyways, but it's very much another blessing.
Yeah.
how would you describe to someone what the Steph & Craig show is all about?
So it is all about us, and Craig, and it's our lived experience together of navigating and healing together over the course of the past 13 years of our relationship.
So we talk all about our relationship and all about what we're going through and navigating.
We bring on people that are in that space of mental health, emotional health, healing.
And it's currently, like I mentioned earlier, we're kind of evolving right now.
That's what we just did, like episode 80 or something like that.
I can't remember.
um
The first portion of the podcast was, that's what the focus was, was really, because we were coming off the heels of being relationship coaches.
And so we were in the space of working with people and talking about relationship things and healing together and all that kind of stuff.
So that was a big focus and impetus for the show, but we're changing it up now.
We don't quite know what it's going to be moving forward, but it's very much just us basically and our experiences and what we're going through.
and the people that we're interested in talking to.
We wanna have you guys come on the podcast as well.
yeah, yeah.
But that's more of what it is now.
So you guys were relationship coaches.
Was that um when you moved to Tennessee or was that before you moved to Tennessee?
It was all around the same timeframe.
We were doing some part of it.
It was basically in its beginning stages before we moved.
And then when we got here and we were able to really settle in after being here for a few months and got to really focus on it is when we really started putting out not just more
content around it, but really started building the infrastructure for it to where we started working with couples and coaching couples together.
And it was great.
We would work with couples.
We'd also work with individuals as well, but when we worked with a couple, we would work with them over the course of three months.
So the first month would be one-on-ones with each of us.
I would work with the husband and Steph would work with the wife, and then we would come together and work with them together.
So it was really, really nice.
I liked how we did it, but it just, yeah.
It was kind of the same concept of what you guys went through, right?
Where are you?
Did you also do em the like MDMA therapy and all that with them?
No, we didn't do the MDMA part with it.
No, all of it was, we never did any in-person coaching with people.
All of our clients were remote clients and stuff like that, yeah.
So now um it's going it's basically sharing a lot of what you guys have learned through your healing journey and your life experiences and then having people come on to kind of
coincide with some of that basically.
Yeah.
And it's, literally just the stuff that we're interested in.
That's one thing like, and that's the other thing that I like would offer up.
And I'm sure you guys have already started to witness it too, where it's like, once you get past like 10 or 20 episodes of a podcast, it starts to have a life of its own.
And it's like, you're catching up to what it's becoming.
You're constantly always behind the wheel because the podcast is moving out ahead of you becoming what it's supposed to be.
And you're trying to catch up to figure out what that is.
And
so true.
about the time where you're like, we got this figured out.
Then it's like, no, you don't.
And it keeps going and keeps going and keeps evolving.
So we're at that phase now where we're evolving into something new.
And truthfully, it comes in conjunction with our evolution and with our growth.
We feel so much more genuinely, authentically who we are than we've ever been before.
And it almost doesn't match who we presented when we started the Steph & Craig show last year, because we launched in May of 2024.
Okay.
we're different people today.
So it's kind of this interesting phase for us where not quite sure what it's going to be looking like.
We know that it's still something that we're excited by and it's evolving, but it's in a transitory state right now.
So it's kind of fun to just see what's happening next.
Well, I think it's em it's very fluid, right?
Like the whole process, the whole journey is very fluid.
So and but you guys have gone on such a healing journey.
And I think I mean, you're obviously still probably always on a healing journey, because like you said, once you see it, once you're aware you can't unsee it.
So you're probably always working on stuff, even if it doesn't take a lot of effort.
You're still on top of things and um evolving.
So it makes sense that.
your podcast would also kind of flow with you guys too.
You have so much to share with people.
It's amazing.
Yeah, yeah, it's a lot of fun.
The one of the driving forces behind all of it that I have to constantly kind of remind myself of is I think that one of the really unique things that we all get to experience in
relationship with each other and even just this even this experience, right?
The three of us sitting here talking back and forth is you're seeing things about your experience based off of my experience because of the mirroring effect that takes place.
And so
Our goal is always to try to hold up the biggest mirror that we possibly can so that the most people can see themselves in that mirror.
Because that's the thing that really helps us heal is knowing that we're not alone and that we didn't like if we know that somebody else went through what we experienced and
have gone through and they made it out or even if they didn't make it out and they're still in it, like there's something about knowing that you're not alone that's really
important.
So we try to hold up the biggest mirror that we can and in doing so, that means we have to bring the most of ourselves to the page in a sense and kind of show up.
that's the whole game is how authentically us can we be and at the same time not have it be some, know, like we, that's our goal is to always try to be as real as possible.
And it's, it's hard.
Yeah.
think it's the key.
And I think that if you aren't, people see through it.
um But like you had just said, you know, uh being able to connect with one person or where they feel understood.
That's one of the reasons that we started this, too, was that um if somebody out there hears something from one of our episodes that helps them not feel so crazy or helps them
feel not alone or, you know, gives them some clarity, then it's worth
all the work, you know, doing it like that.
And I love your concept of trying to be the biggest mayor, what you guys are doing for people.
And you have so much wisdom to share from your experiences.
And it's so vast that you guys are going to be I'm sure you're a huge mayor for people.
So it's really, really cool.
Is your studio in is it on site for you guys?
it's just an extra bedroom in our house.
Yeah, when we moved here, was the office space that the previous people had had.
And immediately we threw the podcast gear in there.
then when we built this whole, because originally it wasn't this whole, you know, setup.
This was something that really came forth and we created it.
And it was like, wow.
When this started happening, it just got bigger and bigger and bigger.
Originally, it was like, we're going to get two cameras.
And I'm like, baby, I really want three cameras.
Like I knew what I wanted from a a technical standpoint.
I knew what I wanted to have the end product look like.
But I also knew from all my years of doing it that it's like that's a lot.
And it also comes with a huge learning curve that I don't have yet.
So it was always like pushing it out, pushing it out.
And finally it came time and and we kept trying to make it small.
Like originally I got some equipment and it was like fifteen hundred dollars.
And I'm like, I'll make it work because that's always what it was.
Is it's like, what do we have that we can make work?
And we tried to make it work and I recorded some content and we did some test shoots and it just looked like shit.
And I was like, this is terrible.
We're not gonna do this.
And so then we had to get serious about it.
you once you have something high quality, you're like, let's say you have two high quality cameras, but the third one is in.
So you're not you can't use you need to upgrade the third one.
You can't have you're like, that angle is the worst.
So it's just it once you see it, you cannot.
So through all this journey or maybe your recent journey, has there been any um Gen X or millennial personalities or um authors or actresses or athletes or musicians or
anyone that's had an impact on you or has inspired you.
Yeah, some of the people that really like there's, you know, I'm not like I'm not super into sports.
um I'm into pickleball and MMA.
um I trained Jiu-Jitsu.
I still train Jiu-Jitsu.
I've been practicing Jiu-Jitsu for over 20 years.
uh I fought a couple of times when I was in my 20s.
So Jiu-Jitsu and MMA has been a real long time passion for me.
What's that?
said don't mess with you.
uh
I'm all about love at this point in life.
But so I'm not really into sports, super into movies and film and everything.
So there's so many actors that have shaped and influenced my journey and my life.
Like I very much can.
I have moments in my life that are directly connected and correlated to movies, and that's just the nature of it.
I mean, I'm just a huge movie buff authors.
I'm not too big of a reader.
uh Some of the people that really shape and influence the healing aspect of my journey.
don't even necessarily think they would, you know, like they're not Gen Xers.
Like Ram Dass isn't a Gen Xer.
uh Carl Jung, shadow working, all those kind of things.
Rick Doblin, but he's not Gen X either.
He's a little bit older.
Yeah, I don't know.
More of like the, like Matt Damon is my favorite actor of all time.
yeah, yeah.
I'm pretty sure he's a Gen X or he's an elder millennial.
I think he's a Gen X.
Seems like a too.
Yeah.
Actually.
Yeah.
Now he's he's cool.
What genre movies from like our your childhood, our childhood time, if you had to pick some of the movies that really shaped you, what would you say they were?
So early on, uh real fantasy based stuff like the never ending story, uh obviously Star Wars.
I mean, you can't grow up in the time period, especially with two older brothers and everything and not be a Star Wars fanatic.
we were super into all of those things growing up.
um I'm very much into like...
Yeah, like Braveheart, Last of the Mohicans, actors like Damon and De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio and I'm trying to think.
Some of the movies, like all the gosh, what's the guy that did all the why can't I think of his name?
But he did Ferris Bueller.
He did all of those.
Yeah, not Broderick, though, the guy that directed them.
Yes, John Hughes, all the John Hughes stuff.
yes.
All the John Hughes stuff, all the John Hughes stuff.
Yeah.
And did you this is more current, but have you seen The Patriot?
That's a good one, too.
Yeah, I love movies.
I love movies.
So um one of my last questions I always ask, but before I ask it, I always look at Brian because he always has other questions before I ask it.
Did you have any other questions?
I kind of do, but I mean, I'm interested in Jung as well.
I love Carl Jung.
If I had a religion, it would probably tend towards his writings.
So I can relate to that.
I'm huge fan of Jung.
I hope I have too many other questions.
The one question, more of a comment, is you mentioned how, I'm curious.
I don't know how to even articulate this, but.
the podcast, when you do an episode or you have an experience and you meet someone, it kind of, you evolve with it, right?
How much has that changed?
I find it impacting me.
We've met with some really, really cool people.
You included.
You included, obviously, yes.
And it's always an honor for us to meet new people and for people to share as much as they do with us.
And it's just tremendous.
And I often leave kind of touched in a sense or reflective and...
I think it helps me evolve.
And oh I think that helps us evolve as a couple in our podcast.
Are you guys experiencing that same thing and how it drives kind of where you're going in a sense?
Helps steers the ship in a sense.
Yeah, it really, really does.
There's something that's unique to like the experience of it and the format of it because rarely do we have these type of conversations in life, right?
And the ability for people to tune in and listen to these type of conversations.
And I think that there's something about the way that we consume and listen to podcasts.
You you're throwing them in your ears and you're driving and you're commuting or you're doing yard work or dishes like you're consuming information.
at moments in time when your brain is busy doing other things, which means your subconscious is alert and listening and tapped in.
So you're distracted, your conscious mind, but you're picking up things subconsciously and from that other space that, I mean, there's been so many, not just podcasts that we've
experienced with guests and even with each other, like showing up and recording an episode every week when uh with each other is massively impactful.
where we're learning more and more and more consistently about each other and having conversations with each other.
So we really credit the growth of our relationship in conjunction with the podcast because we had a dedicated time every single week that we were sitting down without any
distractions and talking to each other.
So it was really important and beneficial for that.
But I do think that it does change.
Like there's no way that it can't, right?
Because you're showing up and you're having such impactful
conversations with people and it's that whole mirroring thing that I was talking about where that's the beauty of what relationships are and how it goes.
We're supposed to shape and influence each other.
You know, my experience is supposed to help you on your experience and the only way for that to happen is if I share it with you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you're sharing it with all of our listeners and with all of your listeners.
And so the reach just continues and continues.
And you're right.
It's putting it all out there.
I always say, um whatever we create, we want to create it authentically and like to go along with what you allude to with love.
And then once we put it out there, it's really not ours anymore.
It belongs to whoever consumes it.
And as long as you have good intentions behind what you created,
and you did it with love and you did it authentically, you can safely put it out there for people to consume.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's a whole other fun, like learning curve there as well.
Learning about, your intention that you put out there.
You really have to let go of it.
You have to just say, okay, well, however this is received is however it's received because we get so many people that didn't receive it the way that we thought they would or
respond to a piece of content that
Like, oh, okay, we did not uh see that angle of it, you know, and sometimes it's really clear where they're coming from to like, obviously, some people just have an axe to grind
because they're hurt and in pain, but it's a really fun thing to experience.
is fun though when it resonates with someone and they actually take it even maybe further than maybe the positivity you were trying to put out there.
But it really relate to it and it really hits home.
It's kind of cool.
It's amazing really.
But there are definitely people out there that project.
Yeah, that's how I view it is uh if somebody needs to take the time to really
project something negative, that's just something they're doing it from within themselves and it really has nothing to do with us.
Yeah, that's kind of how I look at it.
So did you have any other?
I think I'm good.
So my last question is always, where do you see yourself in five years?
You know, I love that question.
I'll be I'll be 49.
So I will almost be 50 in five years.
I just had my 44th birthday.
I well, I shouldn't say I just it was in March, so it wasn't that long ago or it was a while ago.
I I honestly don't know.
I think that we'll still be doing something in the space of what we're doing now just simply because it's so enjoyable.
We like it so much.
um sharing our experiences and being able to communicate with people this way and podcasting and everything like that.
But what I'd like to see actually, and truthfully this might be what it is, is we've been really feeling nomadic lately and wanting to travel way, way more.
And some of our best times together is when we've been able to get away for weekends together.
And back in the day when we had to worry about kids and babysitters and stuff like that, we used to have just the coolest trips together.
Since we've moved here to Tennessee, we've started uh doing that again and going out and spending a few days out and doing different trips.
And our son's old enough now and he's getting himself squared away and set up in life and structured in such a way where what we're starting to picture is uh we can just leave and
hit the road.
Because everything we do, we can pick up and do wherever we want to do it, right?
So ideally, we're going to go and...
travel and explore and set up camp at different places, depending on what we want to do and where we want to stay.
And then he's got a place here in Tennessee that he can live and every now and then mom and dad come home and have to, you know, hang out for a week or two or something like
that.
Yeah, yeah.
So that's kind of what we're envisioning.
And I, I feel like that's the path that we're going towards where we're just going to start traveling a lot more and being a lot more nomadic simply because we have the ability
to, and we have so much fun when we do it and
As far as like, we're really, really blessed that we've created the life that we've created for ourselves because we literally do whatever we want every single day.
We don't ever have to do something that we don't want.
And every now and then we kind of do every now and then life still throws you something that you, you know, we have to go do this thing.
But we've learned over the years that if we don't want to do it, we don't do it.
And the more we just go towards the things that we want to do, a better life gets.
So.
Like we sleep in until like 10 o'clock at night or 10 o'clock in the morning and we wake up and we do yoga outside on our front deck and you know just have the laziest of lazy
days and then if it's a recording day we'll come in and record and it's a really easy way of living and I love it.
So we're just going to perpetually create more of that relaxation and doing things that we want to do and I think it's going to take us out there traveling around and doing
different stuff.
So I'm excited for it.
For sure.
I will tell you, 50 is awesome.
I found it, I think you did.
We found it to be very liberating.
It's been a cool decade.
You're going to love your 50s.
It's so fun.
Yeah.
I'm in this phase right now where I feel like I'm I'm I haven't seen the best version of me yet.
Like health wise, mental health wise, emotionally, spiritually, like I'm entering into the best phase of my life.
So I'm excited for what's coming.
And I feel like Steph feels the same way.
She's I've seen you guys talk about menopause and perimenopause and everything on there.
So she's I mean, that's a big chunk of what's going on with her right now.
which means that's what's going on with me right now because it can't help not be in it.
And I'm excited to see the back end of that as well.
And so I know that that's a big transitory state.
Yeah, it's yeah.
Forties is when I went through it and it's a ride.
ah But uh I will say hormone replacement therapy has been a game changer for me.
And I know it is for a lot of women.
I don't know if she's looked into that, but that's my one piece of advice is that that has been a game changer.
So that's crazy.
we had this thing a couple of years ago when she started, um, when she started not just seeing symptoms and signs, but also started learning about it and educating herself about
it.
And then when I finally like realized what was happening, I went through the process of like, cause I consume through podcasts.
That's how I get all my information.
And so I went down all the rabbit holes and started consuming all the perimenopause and menopause information that I could get so that I could start, not just supporting her, but
Eventually, I like crossed over the hump to where now I'm educating her about what her body's doing and how these things are happening.
And I want her on HRT.
I want her on all of these different projects.
I like I've got a protocol set out for her based off of all of this information.
So it's definitely the spot that I think she's going to get to at some point.
For sure.
And that's amazing that you're being that you are being so involved, so supportive.
um That's that is just such going to make such a difference for you guys, because there's so many times the woman she doesn't even know what's going on, let alone be able to
explain it to her partner.
And she feels like she's going crazy.
So.
We've seen friends during this phase where they're getting divorced because in some way it's the undercurrent, right?
It's the thing that is really underneath the surface that nobody's addressing and instead it's coming out in all of these other ways.
And so it's like, it's such a significant change that I think, and it's cool to see it come out more and more and more.
All the things that are popping right now with menopause I think are so needed and so important.
Good you're on it though as a guy because I think part of the challenge is I wasn't equipped, Nicole was doing a lot of legwork and research and educated me.
And to your point, either way we're going through it, right?
As partners we're going through it, but uh it's interesting that you are all over it.
No, it's great.
And I think, you know, the more we all talk about it, it should be talked about.
I want for the younger generations to not.
I want them to know like it should be talked about just like puberty.
Like it should be talked about just because and to your point, it does affect couples.
They need to know this is coming.
So everybody get ready and you will make it through as long as you have the right tools and you're equipped.
But if you go in blind, your marriage could fail, honestly.
So, yeah, but um that but the fifties.
Other than that, although that was a lot of my forties.
The 50s are fun.
I'm excited for you guys, because I think you guys are going to kill the 40s and then you're going to get to 50.
You're like, wow, this is so cool.
so we can't thank you enough for coming on and sharing your story, Craig.
I know that there's going to be so many people that this resonates with.
So we just, means a lot to us that you shared so much with us and with our listeners.
Appreciate how much you shared too, man.
You're an open book.
It's awesome.
It's amazing.
you so much, guys.
This has been great.
been, you know, it's taken me a lot of work to get to this spot, to be able to not just share and talk about and process and fill all of these things.
But again, it's the whole thing of like.
My story is probably similar to a lot of people's stories, and there's a lot of things that I've navigated and experience that I know I'm not alone on, and it's stuff that
people don't talk about.
And that's the thing that I really learned, especially in that men's group.
of how important it is to talk about things and to be heard.
And I think it's necessary.
So it's the same old thing of like, we gotta go first.
And if I want my kids to be able to do, you if I want them to be able to heal in their 20s rather than trying to heal in their 40s, then I might as well get the ball rolling.
100%.
No, it's so true.
And for any of our listeners, the Steph and Craig show is on YouTube and Apple and Spotify, and I assume anywhere you can listen to podcasts, correct?
Correct, yeah, you can find it anywhere.
And then they're on TikTok, they're on Instagram, Facebook.
We are going to link their socials and where you can listen into the description.
um But definitely check them out, because if you liked this episode, you're going to love listening to more of what they have to share and what they have to say.
So, again, thank you, Craig, so much for joining us.
And um if any of our listeners have any questions or comments, we love to hear from you.
Please leave them.
If you have any questions for Craig, we'll make sure that he's aware so he can get back to you and we will see you next time.
Bye.