Understanding Male Friendship and Purpose Through F3 Workouts

[00:00:00]all right Tim wittmeyer Dave Redding welcome to the show glad to be here happy to be here well I've had lots of requests to have you two on the show you were the leaders of an amorphous like what's that monster that you cut off its head and it keeps growing another head was I think hydra hydra a hydra organization called f3 before we get into what f3 is you talk a little about your backgrounds sure this is Tim and I was born and raised in California grew up mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area came back east for college graduated from Harvard in 1992 with a degree in political science went to work as a journalist spent most of 13 years with the Associated Press as a reporter in Rhode Island New York Lexington Kentucky and then moved to Charlotte in 2000 left journalism and you know 6:00 and spent most of the last 10 years working for various financial services firms here in the second largest banking Center in the country mostly in kind of marketing and business development positions so that was my background this is Dave I grew up in Connecticut but the army sent me south after I graduated college and I've never really been back and I ended up at Fort Bragg and Special Forces last few years of my career and went to law school at Wake Forest here in North Carolina because I really like the state and at law school I met my wife who was from North Carolina so as it often happens Yankee come South Coast College meets a girl from North Carolina never leaves again we got a lot of guys in that category so I've been practicing law here in Charlotte for the last 20 years yes and I should say I should say I also I married a southerner she's from Richmond but her mother is from North Carolina and we've got a we got two sons and a daughter Sam all right well here it's gorgeous in North Carolina haven't been out there yet it's one of them all my to-do list though a little a little steamy this time of year but but yes it's nice so you guys started this organization called f3 before so what does f3 stand for and what do you guys do at f3 so f3 is a men's workout group at it's at its most basic we have a stated purpose of the reinvigoration of what male community leadership that's why we do it but all that was kind of downstream from its origins it really just started out as a a workout group for men to get together workout outdoors outside of a gym and not pay a personal trainer to do it so it's called f3 because that's a description of what it's turned out to be and the first F stands for fitness that's the magnet of f3 that's what brings men into our fitness groups the second half is fellowship and that's glue that's what results from working out together under tough conditions and the third F stands for faith and that's not any particular denomination or world view it just means you've become aware that there's something outside of yourself that really Maps there's a big world out there and you stop thinking about yourself and you're addressing and what you might do about it put those three things together right you have a book called Freda lead and I love how you describe these the organic evolution of this thing and as you said this didn't start you guys didn't start off with like you have this grand mission to like reinvigorate Mel leadership in the community it was basically I want to get a good workout so what was that what was just like Tim Dave like you both felt like you were position in your life or like man my fitness is really hit you know verbal I need to improve in this area yeah so so this is Tim I you know Dave and I met at this workout that preceded the creation of f3 and at the time I started going to that that group which met at a park here in Charlotte and you know 7:00 a.m. on Saturday morning for outdoor bootcamp style workout I was I had a head road as an undergraduate in college at about a hundred and ninety pounds and I was running about 250 when I started going out to that workout in 2008 and and so for me it was really this thing of I'm gonna I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna start working out with these guys and I'm gonna get my butt kicked out there and I'm gonna want to get in shape to kind of keep up with these guys and that's all getting more serious about what I was eating and also about doing some other exercise and some body weight exercises not just running all the time which is actually a pretty inefficient way to to burn calories so that was really my impetus to go out there keep going out there and in the course of doing that was you know Dave came out as well and he and I got to know each other started talking about what else was bringing us out there besides just the fitness part of it and sort of gained the steeper understanding but Dave kind of had his own reasons for being out there as well yeah I mean when I was in the Army I was always in very good shape but law school disabuse me of the notion that that was the result of any self discipline and I had the unit requirements army requirements to be in shape and being a leader it was incumbent upon me to do so but that was all external I gained a lot of weight in law school and then after that it had a really hard time keeping it off I could I found that I could I could lose 40 pounds in gained 40 pounds pretty quickly and I did it a lot then ten years in between graduating law school and then getting involved in this predecessor that free I might have gained and lost at 40 pounds five or six times so really what I was in search for when I was invited to this workout was a way to maintain some kind of consistent fitness and what I found was that having the accountability of other men there when you inevitably when you're in good shape you know it's a it's a pendulum or a parabola or whatever you get in good shape and then you kind of start falling out of shape a little bit right there is when you need another man to say to you look you look like you gained some weight back or you're slowing how come you haven't been out here and well I 3 is just just that suggestion by another guy because we're quick to jump on each other when we haven't when a guy's kind of slop sliding because all I really needed and ever since we started f3 I haven't had that up-and-down problem anymore I've been able to maintain my weight so for me that was the reason I started and it's been a big reason why I keep doing right but uh like as you said f3 wasn't f3 when you first started it was just a bunch of guys getting get her to work out as you said it was sort of a shoot off of another workout group that was going on at what point did you guys realize that this f3 workout was bigger than what you thought it was originally yeah so so we so the origin of what we came to call f3 came in the fact that the the group that we were meeting with the guy who was leading it guy named chef Caleb uh decided that it had grown too big and it's the irony is that the the point at which it had grown too big in his mind was twenty-five guys which is just sort of a I mean kind of crazy considering how big it's become since then but so he shut it down two new guys and this was in the summer of 2010 and Dave and I had become friends by then and we're so talking about what this had done in our lives and kind of looked at each other and said well this is crazy we want to get in front of more guy so let's go start another location you know we've got too many guys at Freedom Park let's go to this middle school a couple miles away and we have we both had been in town for about ten years at that point so we all we had relatively long lists of guys we knew we put together this email about as I recall about a hundred guys and we sent a series of emails throughout December of 2010 saying hey you might have heard about this workout group at Freedom Park well we're gonna launch another location we'd love you to come out it'll be New Year's morning you know come come work off your hangar you know start the new year right although so resolution Airy stuff that people do and we figured we'd get two or three guys out there on New Year's morning and build it in much the same way that the workout at Freedom Park had built which was sort of by ones and twos and about ten minutes into the workout after guys started sweating and smelled like a distillery out there and and the crazy thing was those guys instead of it being like the YMCA you know where you can't get a locker the first week in January and it's it's a it's a desert again by the end of February these guys kept coming out and kept coming back and wanted to do more they want to work out during the week they wanted to do crazy races and Spartan races and mud runs and stuff and it's just snowball from there and it got to a point very early that spring where we realized okay well this one location isn't enough we're gonna plant a couple other locations on Saturday morning to take the the pressure off of this one location that now has for your thighs and part with that challenge came we need guys to lead that because we're not the only we can't be the only ones who are capable of leading this so so and again this this workouts free right won't pay for it yeah okay and you you submission it's a boot camp-style workout I mean what does it someone were to go to an f3 workout this saturday what would they sneeze well really depend where they go we say bootcamp really is kind of a placeholder what it is because f3 doesn't prescribe or prescribe any particular form of exercise it really depends on the local leader it's very decentralized so we have groups that cycle groups that run together but the typical bootcamp workout is going to be a mixture of running and body weight resistance exercises and maybe using whatever is available in local area to assist that so if there's say a playground you know we'll use the swing set to do pull-ups on for instance but for the most part we don't add any gear to that like except for maybe kettlebells we'll carry rocks for instance or cinder blocks or something that's kind of organic to the area and the whole idea there is to keep those barriers to entry down so you know like what we call the EH or the emotional headlock is what we put on a guy to recruit him and you know you'd say the guy watch come on workout to Saturday of course he says first question what's it cost we say nothing second question is you know what do I have to bring and we say nothing you know and that makes it much easier to get a guy to come out because they didn't have to worry about buying a gear or having any kind of gear also it depends on where you are so it started here in Charlotte what we call Charlotte metro and got a section years ago so guys have been doing it here for quite a while you come to a weekday workout here which is 45 minutes long weekday boot camp workout you might run four miles in those 45 minutes and still do a bunch of push-ups yeah slots and burpees right so the the running itself will be in a very high pace for brief periods on you might run a quarter mile you run a mile it just depends on whatever the leader comes up with we do a lot of running uphill you know or in tough terrain to kind of tough on ourselves up but I you know if people ask me what are the components of a workout what should it look like I say do what do you discover what you think works but try to to have 3 s's and 2 tees and the 3 s's are speed and stamina and the two T's our toughness physical and toughness mental in other words do something to accelerate the man's strength you know challenge them there do something to try to make them a little faster do something to try to give them more than they can handle for a distance you know so they can build that stamina and that'll give you physical toughness you're rolling around in the rain you know in the mud or whatever that makes you physically tough and then that that mental aspect of it I mean we meet in the dark we don't have a lot of safety things that we do we start exactly on time and if you're not there you get left behind we don't carry water bottles we don't take breaks and all that goes into I think I heard one of your earlier podcasts Brett with the stoicism guy and one of the things he said was that doing things that make you uncomfortable are good for the soul I'm paraphrasing what he said but you know he said you know don't wear don't wear enough clothes for the weather in other words be a little cold you know expand out your comfort zone and I've heard that knows that wow that's that's f3 you know a lot you know nutshell you know coz we we just don't bow to anything that would make you comfortable he even said there's something we say which is personal comfort should not be your watchword you know that you set yourself aside take on a little pain you know we're a bunch of doctors and lawyers and accountants and whatever we are right so this might be the only physically difficult thing you're going to do that day but that's a huge part of it so if you if you go to a workout you can be pretty sure that you're gonna be challenged physically and mentally a little bit pushed past where you want to go the leaders are gonna be looking for the mean you know they're they're not looking to kill anybody but they want to challenge the guys that are and that's part of the leadership is figuring that out how to do that well and then I would just add the other piece of it is nobody's nobody's gonna get left behind and that's one other thing we really hammer with our with our leaders is lead the work out in a way that you're not gonna drop anybody so you know a lot of Dave was talking about you know there's going to be some running but the metaphor I use this kind of pearls on a string right so you're never gonna run more than an eighth or a quarter of a mile at a time and nobody's gonna get left too far behind at that point when you're done with that running segment everybody's gonna plank up you're gonna wait for what we call the six which is the last man and in line to get there and then we're gonna do some sort of set piece a body weight exercises maybe we'll just put guys in a circle and count cadence and do exercises that's called a circle of pain maybe we'll do something like pick a hill go to the top do one Burpee run back down and go to the top again do two burpees do that two seven and you call it a Jacob's Ladder and so those set pieces are the pearls and the string is the running through the whole thing we can keep you moving throughout the entire 45 minutes or an hour and that's your basic f3 workout is pearls on a string and I know I'm at a good workout when during the running I'm like I can't wait to stop and do some push-ups and we're doing push-ups as I can't wait to start running again alright so this thing started growing organically you sent that email yet 34 guys show up and people kept coming back to the point where you had to actually split up instead another group somewhere else at this point did you guys still have your mission for f3 like was it was it f3 yet like when did f3 become f3 at what point in this this bootcamp did it transition to what it is today I think it was about it was about 2 months after we started talking about splitting the first location was when we came up with the name because it was one of the guys would helped us plant it originally who said to Dave who's a friend of both of us hey you know what this really is is it's Fitness in this fellowship and it's faith because we started doing as part of our we do we call at the end of the workout we have what we call the circle of trust and we all sit around a circle and everybody says their name and their age and then they they say their f3 nickname because we're super tribal about all this stuff and everybody gets given a nickname so that you're part of the tribe and then we usually have announcements of some sort and then we do a prayer at the end or a shout out and it can really be you know around here and in the Bible Belt it usually is a prayer but in Seattle sometimes it's just some sort of you know more secular words of wisdom or whatever but now that is and that's the only sort of faith-based piece of the workout but those were the three FS was he said you guys got the fitness and the guys keep coming back because of the fellowship and and you got this faith piece so it's it's after three and we were like hey that's really good I'm gonna use that yeah and we had a guy a designer friend of mine do a logo for us there was a kind of a military stencil font with the F a little a little three that was kind of the in the cubed position next to the F put a circle around it and put on some stickers and started to guys and I started popping up on cars all over Charlotte and then the next thing you know you're driving down the highway going to the beach or something and you see another f3 sticker and and you realize that wow this thing's really kind of taken off so so I'm curious like one of the circle of trust Art League was that something you started off with right away with the first workout or was that something that kind of grew organically you thought hey let's try this thing no it's kind of funny as many things happen with us it already with an idea of practicality initially I was leading most of the workouts and at the end we didn't have any formal real system we just kind of ended it and we right back blast which is just a short narrative of a workout afterwards we want to lose to everyone who was there and I was trying to do that out of memory and I was having a tough time doing that one day Tim and I are running with another guy he says you know what we really ought to do is sit around in a circle and count often and say shows name so we get a chance to get that done and the funny part of this is of course I was looking for a way a mechanism to capture everyone's name so the idea appealed to me Tim on the other hand are immediately rejected it and said that's kumbaya bunch of junk we're not gonna do that now the funny Aaronic part about that if you know us is I'm more to the right edge and he's more than left edge so you would have expected me to be the one to say it you know that's just some millennial sentimentality when I engage in but you know we talked about it so some more and we decided to try it and we the first time we tried it it was a huge hit I mean the guys loved it so we say you know we firstly count off so we make sure we know how many guys were there then we said what we call your hospital name and that's what your parents named you before they knew what your gonna be then you're at three names so we get that down and in your age because it's it's incredibly interesting to know how old guys are and what that age range is and then after that one guy volunteers and as Tim said he can pray to to anything he wants all we really want to inculcate a feeling of thankfulness for the opportunity to have spent that 45 minutes together and to become better men and the prayer just branches out from there I've been to a lot of different places in f3 and I haven't been out west where I guess it's they're gonna be a little more you know gaya based or something but oh no back there they kind of say the same things you know just this demonstration of thankfulness for being men together and getting this opportunity to carve out 45 minutes to make each other stronger that that's really the heart of it and then we walk out from there sometimes hope you don't pray for things specifically but for the most part that's that's really what it is just that it's just that demonstration it's hugely popular and I'll proclaim myself cuz I was the one who thought it was the worst idea to ever heard and now it's I mean it's one of the five core principles there's only sort of five rules to an f3 workout and one of them is you have to end with a circle of trust and and I'm like a lot of other guys in that if I go to another workout and it just sort of ends with guys just kind of walking away from each other up see you later like you just doesn't feel right like they it becomes the the ritual of it becomes this immensely meaningful thing as a way of sort of ending our time together so that's awesome and what I love about it is that how I organic it was like you weren't thinking like this is it something that will bring us together was like this solves a practical problem but coincidentally it's it became a ritual that's the way we do almost every service yeah we you know you alluded to we had a lot of different words for everything and that we've try to cap capture those in our lexicon on our website and really all those are are things we've heard a lot of come from the military but a lot of come from movies and other things in our culture we share and that's what I think it is it's an expression of the f3 culture the uniqueness of every culture doesn't mean that it's it's not influenced by things outside of f3 in fact it all comes from things outside of f3 but when we see or hear a good idea and good meaning it advances the ball it's missional you're very quick to try to spread that and capitalize on it and by the same token we've had some ideas we puddle up and had some is that on paper on the whiteboard look great we've tried them they don't catch on you just throw those away you know and we just keep moving if it works we're gonna keep doing it if it doesn't more quick to abandon it and Brad I would I would say one aspect one thing that really shapes out is the fact that it's it is free and it's volunteer-led and it's not a revenue based organization basically the only revenue we generated are we we sell f3 gear go on the the store that's on our website you can buy an f3 shark guys do custom shirts for different locations we put a 10% tax on the gear sales anything that's got the logo on it that's the only revenue we generate and we use that to fund to fund spreading f3 to new cities but because we run that way we have to be almost I just have a killer instinct about like if something's not working we're gonna drop it if somebody's not working in a position as head of expansion we're probably gonna move on pretty quickly from that and if something works we're gonna just grab it and hold on do it and it makes you it makes you kind of lethal with your instincts on that stance we don't you know we're all we're all trying to make a live in other ways and and we don't you know you don't know you know time out of messing around yeah f3 as an organization resembles a lizard not a bullfrog I mean we're lean and light we keep moving because we have to gotcha so two months in he said you kind of figured you're on to something bigger let's talk about in the book that f3 solves a problem that many American men are facing the day what is that problem that f3 is the solution for so we call that sad clown syndrome and we got that name from The Sopranos an episode The Sopranos that well there's an episode Tony is being psychoanalyzed by his psychiatrist and trying to explain she actually asks him that there's a tension or a dichotomy between his family life and trying to portray a family man and the fact that he's a gangster and he misunderstands the flashing and responds you know yeah everybody expects me to play the sad clown you know happy on the outside and sat on the inside and now both Tim and I were Sopranos fans we both saw that and we're talked about it one day and thought it the aptly described the plight of American man in this age which is you you're in you're in high school and your dad says study hard why are you getting a good college you're in college study hard why so you can get a good job why a good job you can have a family specialized everything leads to another thing but there's no ultimate purpose on that you know there's no answer to any of that and you know I think I was in my mid-40s when we started this early on that a lot of guys were around that age range in fact I think the mode age was 43 that was the most common age when we were in those circles of trust what we realized was who's really drawing in a lot of guys who had God kind of the first 20 years of their career knew what they were doing they weren't really asking their dad for that much advice in fact your dad might have been getting a little bit of long a tooth was asking him for some advice when they're walking in the break room at work and everybody got quiet they realized they were talking about him for the first time Hank I'm the I'm the man now and yet felt ill-equipped to deal with that you know something was missing right what it's lack of kind of purposeful I'm doing these things I'm making money I'm stroking checks somebody asked me to do someone who looks the right thing I go to I go to church you know I volunteered with the Boy Scouts whatever but if somebody asked me to define why I can't do it and admits this lack of connection to things that eternal you feel obliged to bury it you know you don't want it to reflect it on the outside it would be harmful to the people who love and depend upon it's still there and it's not going away and maybe you know Tim and I are pretty clear about saying we're not psychiatrists or philosophers or sociologists but we are American men with families with jobs and we can see it and this this problem this syndrome leads to other unwanted behaviors drinking too much gambling beat risky behavior things that just are ultimately gonna harm your family harm yourself so we tried to wait to make f-3 this solution to that problem and it turned out that it already was well in our dam in that state we actually we realized f3 was a solution to that problem after the yes that was sort of you know he as it turned out before and I before he and I even knew each other it turns out we've been going to church together for seven or eight years and never knew each other but were part of it was a big vegetable Church in North Carolina neither of us coincidentally goes there anymore but it was this kind of place where guys would show up everybody would put on their ermes ties and their suit on Sunday and go sit in the pews and see em be seen and you you come you know slap another guys back if you saw him in the hall well a lot of guys were just checking the box in there and and we were among them I mean that's the other thing is we are perfectly happy to admit that yes we were sad clowns as well sure for this this thing happened to us which was the predecessor workout and before we sort of found this purpose around f3 so it becomes this thing of like looking around and realized how turns out I was lonelier than I thought I was I thought I had a bunch of friends they weren't actually really that good of friends they were just sort of acquaintances now I've got this workout and it's keeping me in consistent shape so I'm not bouncing up and down on scales anymore on going between fat pants and skinny pants and I've got this consistent group of friends that I see for mornings a week because I'm getting up at 5:30 in the morning and we sweat together and then when we share a bond from that and that in turn has sort of freed me to sort of stop looking at my own navel I wonder why I'm so unhappy and blame my wife for the fact that I'm unhappy and look around and say okay well there's a big world here what can I do to make a difference in it I'm in shape I'm friended I got a lot of energy let me go do something and and the other thing that I'll say about f3 is we're not gonna tell you what to do with that either we just want you to do something with it I don't I don't care you use that energy to serve the homeless I don't care if you want to get on a plane and go to Peru and and build Mission churches I don't care if you want to go plant trees and and do the Al Gore thing it just it does not matter we just want you to have energy around the church things a funny thing was I actually met Tim's wife long before I met him we're on a commission together one day she says you know you you should meet my husband you'd really like him I said tell me about him he was journalist a journalist and I thought and I said of course I said always sounds great yeah but inside I don't think I I'm gonna hate that guy I went to Boston College I went across the river so I have a natural antipathy to two Harvard guys and I'm a warrior you know why would I want to talk to a a guy in the media you know and I and I didn't even know or meet imminent in in the church until long after we started working out together he was teaching Sunday school to one of my daughters and I walk in to pick her up and I just I'm just like shaking hands you know superficially I saw him look to me sister ed if he hadn't seen me in the daylight you know I was like oh btw what are you doing here here's what I go to church here so he says we went to church together for sale I say we went to church apart for seven years now I mean it just left to our own devices in some of these institutions that are designed for a higher purpose like Church men are just not connecting and that that one vignette I think illustrates that disconnect in a very clear way so what f-3 does a just kind of summarize the you guys attack sad clown syndrome from three points but the fitness part I guess a lot of guys who have sad clown syndrome they're like you got like you David like the the Pogo 40 like gaining weight losing weight over and over again and that results in just you just feel like crap no energy so the fitness the workout part is there to help that the fellowship part I think it's interesting because you say that a lot there's a lot of institutions that bring men together but not really what do you think it is about working out with other men that turns you know turns acquaintances into like really strong relationships mutual suffering why did why do Dave and I get in a van with four other guys every September and go run 210 miles for 36 hours straight you know it's just mutual suffering I mean the Army has this figure enough I mean when when you go to basic training you know the first part there's always physical training and just the shared pain and I didn't realize it until after the fact but getting beat down by that drill sergeant and having you know a common common nemesis who's forcing you into joint suffering together is the quickest wall breaker there could possibly be and it just forces you into fellowship like any sports team or anything like that just doing that together sharing that pain does it and it really happens so quickly particularly whether the way f3 is designed a guy comes out for his personal he's shy doesn't know I don't know anybody or just you know he's just a little bit these guys all seem to know each other but the culture that we have is very accepting very quickly but like we like to say we're not gonna leave you behind but nor will we accept you where you are we will encourage you to do better and you know of course because we're men and there's no no reason not to we give each other a hard time yeah you know we get out of those workouts were we're direct with each other and we got we laugh like crazy funny stuff happens funniest thing that can happen in a workout as a new guide and come out and what we call splashmore love that means just throw up and I know that it sound funny and you're listening to her you're right why would that be funny it's because it's happened to us all it's it's like a rite of passage and when that happens you know you've splashed Merlot and man you're one of us now because you what you've done is you've subjected yourself to a level of physical training that you could not do for yourself I mean no one will go out by themselves and run themselves into into nausea that requires chasing after another time and if you're willing to do that and you're willing to subject yourself to that then you're our kind of guy you know I mean you're you you have thrown yourself and you've done the Nestea plunge right and we have just found that that forms those instantaneous bonds from which other a deeper relationship can then develop yeah it's interesting you say that you guys give each other a hard time I just got done talking to a psychologist therapist who specializes in like boys and males they said that you know a lot of time on get a bad rap for like not being nurturing men are actually very nurturing they just do it aggressively it looks very fun why females do it I mean I yeah I'll take issue with with that idea I think what we're more much more truthful with each other you know you can look at the nicknames we another which are generally not calm right now our our parallel women's group you know there's a lot of butter cups and Sunshine's you know but we don't you know we don't do that in fact I think you're doing another guy a serious service Buster's no service no service a service by being Frank and direct with them you know of course that come that's gonna come from the military but you know are maybe this is a little bit growing up Yankee but you know if you grow up in Yankee land and you've got a bigger nose than the next guy your nickname is gonna be schnoz and then you know a thing that you might carry around on your back as a burden gee whiz does everybody think I haven't big nose well we get cut right to the chase yeah you got a big nose and you know what there's still one about you see one of us man we love you for that right you know that that's that's kind of what it is it I think it's helpful for men in a male culture to be that managers have always been that way successful male cultures I only think now you know in our current cultural state is this idea where men are not supposed to do that you know I agree that at a point too much directness can become bully and it really is just a matter of intent if you want to belittle another man to make yourself feel better well congratulations you're a bullet but if you are being direct with a guy and direct with yourself and taking it as much as that you'll give it that's not bullying man that's just being men and we have to as leaders in our communities we have to have enough discernment to be able to see one from the other and and every time somebody gives another guy a hard time that's not necessarily bullying we've got to be able to see that difference and f3 I think aids that so you mentioned so you develop these tight-knit relationships within these workouts because of shared suffering you see sad men with sad clown syndrome what kind of friends they settle for usually well I mean we would categorize that there's I mean we talked about this in the book a bit I mean first of all there's the legacy friends right so your your college buddies and you're like oh yeah we're still friends you know we love we live on the other side of the country from each other but you know we talk at least what once or twice a year so that's that's still one of my buddies we were really tight back when I was 21 22 25 years ago so you got those guys and and we talked about the mandate which is the guy that is married to the woman that your wife is friends with and he's a very convenient partner so that the girls can get together and now we can have a double date and the couples can get together but or you know and a lot of times maybe that's the another dad from your kids soccer team or something like that and you can stand there on the sidelines and talk about oh hey the Panther is one boy Cam Newton looked really good didn't any kind of thing that's a pretty superficial friendship that's not a friend that you've chosen for yourself that's a friend who's proximate and convenient or the wife has picked for you and then you know you're third category is your work buddy and that's guys that you work with there are problems in that relationship though which is that as we all know nobody nobody works for for one company for their entire career anymore so that's gonna change at some point probably one of you is gonna leave you're also in competition with each other if not explicit competition and and that's not somebody that you necessarily are gonna open up to nor er you're necessarily gonna open up to your mandate because there's you know a cross-collateralized relationship between your wife and that man's wife and and you're not gonna necessarily want to muck around with that and then by the time you open up to your to your buddy from college it's probably too late because you picked up the phone for you once yearly call and you're letting him know that yeah my wife and I got separated a few months ago things things weren't going so well well it's too bad didn't pick up the phone and call him three months before you and your wife got separated to talk about the thing that was gonna cause you to separate from your wife so it really we find a lot of guys you know sort of gliding by with these very super super efficient ships and what we found with f3 is that that mutual suffering opens the door to these relationships between women and there was a guy named Billy Baker wrote a really good piece in the in the Boston Globe the spring that got all the f3 guys really fired up when they saw it because it was about loneliness being a huge problem among adult men you see this huge undiagnosed problem and and poor Billy because he got deluge by f3 guys I think every f3 guy emailed them and said you know this is silly for that hey by the way you're a sad clown yeah hey you should start f3 in Boston hey why don't you start out three in Boston wait wait you don't wanna be in Boston you must be a sad clown if by the way we discourage people we discourage guys to accuse other men of being sad clown it's not good marketing I've been Marty right you know when Tim was just described that it reminds me what the narrator says to Tyler Durden when he describes single-serving friends you know so that is really what it is I mean it's it's it's just convenience all right got that you got that far away legacy buddy and you got your old times that you can bask in the glow of you got the mandate you know but when you get divorced your wife gets the better car and she gets all the friends so he's gonna be gone you know and the work buddy man you go to a new job you'll find your guy to clean it off with I mean it's just the way it goes now those friends I think the expression they're not large grain friends yeah they're gonna pass through the sifter out the bottom they won't stick it out when when your life starts shaking apart those kind of friends those things serving friends those small girlfriends Lister they'll just leave you alone right so it sounds like with the the fellowship part of f3 how its solution to the sad clown syndrome is like basically these guys are there for accountability they'll call you on your bullcrap right yeah and then also they're there for current like you know when you're they're working out they encourage you to push yourself harder than you thought you were able to do sure yes sir well let's talk about this the the final faith part let's talk about the problem that you see a lot of men today face in the book you describe a lot of men lack a purpose in life and you call these guy Reacher's after Jack Reacher what do you mean by you know men being a Jack Reacher type guy well I think that because we don't face any existential threat at least today in American haven't really for a long time and there's no draft that were let's face it historically no people have ever been more comfortable and safe than we are well that might have been the goal of all these things people have been doing for the last 3,000 years subtly now it's not very difficult right and I think as it turns out in the heart of men and I I'm not excluding don't know because I'm not one but in the heart of men there is this desire to be heroic to be purposeful to to attain think to have your life mean something and without it man is incomplete and the reason why we call them Reacher's and compare them to Jack Reacher or really any any of these idiosyncratic heroes you know that you find you find in our in our current literature it's because substitute we substitute in our in our in our suburban lives we substitute the idea of doing something truly hard and dangerous with this kind of fantasy life that we read about in books about men doing things that are truly hard and dangerous and all these idiosyncratic heroes or anti-heroes really all share some very basic characteristics one of the most important of which is they're very rarely married they don't have mortgages they don't have stable jobs where they work for someone else you know they're you know they're independent in some way read Jack Reacher being the the fictional embodiment of all these things right a former military guy leaves the military because it's you know it's it's it's not pure enough for him he travels the country on foot basically hitchhiking with nothing but a toothbrush not even toothpaste he has nothing in his pockets but a debit card I think we've upgraded that now he you might have a driver's license because of because of 9/11 before he didn't he walks into a town usually someplace out in the Midwest or in the south somewhere away from the urban area and that town is in the midst of some conflict very clearly good and good and evil he stumbles into it in some way accidentally and neither side the good nor the bad can figure out initially what side he thought the bad guys wanted because he's so huge and menacing the good guys are a little concerned about him but they're able to do some research and find out that he's a former military policeman and he always chooses the good side by the way along the way he hooks up with some woman who's usually from the the law enforcement side of the house of FBI agent or something and they have a very hot set hot relationship mom I guess she's beautiful damage it's beautiful with damage but you know he also makes it very clear to her from the start that he's basically at the end of this he's leaving because he has to because it would destroy this things than they have for him to stay there I mean that is just male fantasy life 101 and fantasy Powell on top one fantasy pals on top another and and to make that that really is diverting to men leading these lives that were leading we're being heroic really is what I mean going out in the rain to get another box of diapers and coming back and changing your kid I mean that's that's real heroic right going home at night bring your paycheck on going home taking care of your family being on making your marriage water making your marriage work being a model to your sons is how a man should act being a model to your daughters is who they should look for in a mate and doing that pretty much every day with a couple of mistakes you know but that's that's a heroic existence but you're really not gonna type of man glorified in today's fiction in today's culture but I have to say there's being being the high tone Harbor guy I don't read John Woo fiction ever so I had never never read any Jack Reacher novels but that was a big 24 fan back same day anyway and and I remember Dave describing the whole Jack Reacher sort of thing to me the first time last night that's basically Jack Bauer I love Jack Val I really were we got rid of the wife at the end of the first season and from then on you know it was it was freeing Larry Bird Travis McGee from an earlier era or Philip Marlowe was another one bill morally oh that well I mean when you think about break you think about the whole thing in Breaking Bad why did people hate Schuyler so much because she had these strings tied to wall they want to be the free free to be the badass that he always wanted to be right so then there's been you know there's always been this kind of alluded tribute to me to be fair to women to they're often inserted as kind of the killjoy resistant into a guy like Barbara Hershey and Hoosiers yes I mean discuss save this town save this kid he's trying to stay sober shoot her up and get him back with his son and Barbara her she's driving to the next time to get all the dirt on I mean you know so you know this kind of male fantasy doesn't it doesn't serve us well though in our daily lives because because male heroism is really starts with your wife and then your children and then your friends and then the younger men who into whom your whoring and passing on positive habits and you know finally it is work you know it's the least most important thing in your life so when we say Reacher that's really our way of saying come on man all that you'll focus on the thing right before you the thing that God put us on earth to do and that's that's to be a great husband and father and man and community you know what you know you the word match man it's race right yeah yeah be a mesh imagine he'll be that guy and so with the virtues that we try to extol an f3 are those virtues and instead of these videos and pratik heroic virtues that are better sometimes over celebrating the literature right so the the third F in faith you make it very clear in the book it's not pushing a denomination or even religion really it's just faith is like a purpose outside of yourself yeah yes so look I mean Dave and I are both practicing Christians we are both more than happy to talk about our faiths at length with any man who wants to have a conversation about that I would argue we probably have slightly different views on it within the realm of Christianity but that's also immaterial to us in the context of f3 what we want is men to come in and and have the energy and the desire to act on whatever their faith is and it many of them are Christians and many of them do take that energy into their churches and into their what we call down here in the south their daily faith walk right um but but I don't really care that what we want is to see men acting with purpose to affect the world outside their simple daily survival on that of the the nuclear family that might depend on them right so you take the stoic guide Brett that you interview you know he he talked about this what the trilateral mission of man or whatever it was you know but you had to recognize those things over which you had absolutely no control and don't worry about who don't think about and you had to look at those things over which you have some control some influence you know put some time and energy into making those right but those things that you can control that you can affect and have an impact on well that's where you should be put most to your energy in time and that's what we tell guys to don't sit in your house and watch Fox TV and yell at those people on TV they're not I mean you never gonna meet President Trump you know you don't have to speak your mind to him but there's there's men and women and children in your community who you could and should impact and influence towards those things that are virtuous as Americans that we hold most dear and for those things you have an obligation in community as a man to be a leader in those ways and that's what we that's just what we mean about faith you know believing that these things are more important than you and being willing to do something about it put your money where your mouth is you know it's really most people say well you know you've this practice sometime preaches really the problem we have my belief is that it's men who won't preach what they practice guys who are leading these objectively virtuous lives they're doing great things with their family but then we'll talk about it they think it's judgmental or they've been beaten up you know they've been beaten down and - keeping it to themselves and we encourage guys to go spread that out talk about it help other men be the same way I mean if it works for you it might well be working for for something might well work for nothing nothing said was he didn't say he had the answer he said he had a answer a purposeful way of living his life and he felt like it was helpful to other people and that's why he wrote the book in fact that guy's a perfect candidate to be a leader in f3 even though I don't I didn't hear him say he's a Christian I think he said he was a Buddhist stoic like right but we would embrace that and say man you you are with us that is exactly what we think something what do you what do you think it is about the the fitness in the fellowship part that energizes men to look beyond themselves you you guys talk about this in the book that you started doing the workouts on a regular basis then it organically you had guys getting together and saying hey we want to do Habitat for Humanity or hey we want to take up this cause in the community what's going on there what is it about working out together with other men that energizes meant to look beyond themselves they are they are in community with each other I mean look I studied at Harvard under Putnam about five hours Putnam yeah so about five years after I graduated he wrote what has become a seminal book in American sociology called Bowling Alone that talks about the atomization of American society that in the in the 1950s you know grown men used to gather on a regular basis bowling leagues and Rotary clubs and Knights of Columbus of Foreign Wars halls and something happened in the 60s and I mean the crazy thing about the book is it's sort of a murder mystery you know who killed American community and he never really comes up with a satisfying answer he thinks it might have been the television it might have been the political upheavals of the 60s and so forth never get a really satisfying answer but something has happened over the last 50 years that has caused people to retreat from one another and from community in this society so a book at the time it came out I found it tremendously disturbing a lot of what's happened you know kind of politically socially since then has reinforced the concern and the thing that I've loved about f-3 since we sort of reverse-engineered what it was doing was it is this organic solution to the Bowling Alone problem it creates community almost everywhere we plant it and it doesn't matter if we plant it in Statesville North Carolina or Hickory North Carolina both relatively small more rural towns in in Charlotte in the San Francisco Bay Area it takes root and all of a sudden you've got guys coming together in a way they have them together and willing to work with each other in a way that you haven't been willing to work with each other since since the 1950s in the 1960s so I it's really it's it's really community it's in you you were talking about this with Jason McCarthy a few weeks ago we're both sitting here referring to all your past podcasts which is I guess the testament of loyal wolf I mean that is go rock is building instant community during those challenges and we've both done a number of the challenges and that is absolutely one of the points is build an instant community of 30 people we use challenges in our iron project leadership school we use that pressurization Jason's at neon suit we're both Special Forces soldiers although 10 or 15 years apart it sounds like but putting men under stress and women as well putting people under stress in leadership position and making them because that is just a great way to teach leadership into and to form a cohesive team and he talked about how you have to spend that first couple of hours you know in that Welcome Party until people figure out how to work together right how to work instead of stop thinking about me how do I work together and I mean we've been doing this in the military for 300 years in America and worldwide has been Nava listen to your your your Roman your Greek and Roman type it's it's that's how you build build a cohesive team and nothing's really ever changed along those lines it's still the right way to do it so for us putting men together and putting them under pressure and building them into leaders because that's the dirty secret about threes it looks like a workout but it's actually a leadership machine that that puts it turns them into leaders and in turn builds community builds bonds and repairs basically repairs the breach in this country and in a small way I'm not saying we've solved the whole problem obviously it's still a huge problem but I you know if you put me in front of President Trump I wouldn't necessarily fuss at him but I would tell them you know mr. president I got to tell you we've got a small piece of a solution that we started down here in Charlotte so if a man walks into f3 for the first time a sad clown that's the archetype what are what's the archetype you guys are going for as a result like what should he look like a month two months after doing an f3 workouts so well we call that first post the first bell so you know I guess that's a wonderful life kind of reference but so we call it the first the second bell is his first leadership experience the leader at f3 is called the cute so you the leader of a workout is there the guy who choose it and the first q is the second Bell and that is usually a dumpster fire because it's a guy that has never led anybody in that situation before and he makes some classic errors but the best part of it he gets that he gets that out of the way and once he's done that and gets some feedback from the other guys and the workout of course they're gonna say yeah he was everything you did what we loved it to again and and guess is kind of leadership feet on the ground starts learning these time-honored leadership skills never though these have never really changed starts learning how to influence other men and to motivate them he starts taking that into other aspects of his life and ultimately becomes what we call a high impact man or a him h-i-m and the high impact man is just is a guy who's willing in the various institutions and organizations of his life he is a man who's willing to take responsibility for the outcome he visualizes things that would give advantage to his groups make them accelerate he articulates those visions in a way that other people can understand them he persuades other people to follow him don't do that to pursue these outcomes and exhorts them to fight through the obstacles that are going to appear to any attend to any effort and in that way he becomes that leader that person that makes things happen that disruptive force that high-impact man ultimately we see it in every group that's been going on you know as long as Susie got two or three months old it seems like it happens guys it starts to work out at a homeless shelter which seems anomalous right why would guys at a homeless shelter want to work out turns out to do or they get together with a group that needs help in any way you know raking leaves cleaning gutters you name it it just becomes that outgrowth he sees a problem a need in his community he has a bunch of guys that he knows he crossed him he asked for their help he tells him what he wants to do and they get in behind him and they do it and uh that's the height impact now so bread just and just to explain a little further we come within a three that's called the reverse-flow incubator and it comes out of the fact that we want guys to come to us with ideas and we want f3 to be their platform for actually ideas as opposed to a top-down approach where you know we're not gonna we're Dave and I are never gonna sit here or whoever else gets the leadership of f3 is never gonna sit here and say you have about the homeless because that happens to be what we care about in fact we share one thing which is that neither of us feel particular traction we just don't um it just it's not our thing like we get that other people do but our thing has always been actually adult men who need to become leaders but it's instead it becomes this thing up you care about the homeless that's great hey we've got this platform of we think about sixty thousand men out met in the across the nation working out together I bet there are a few other people who care about the homeless who are out there and want to band together with you to have an impact so you know we say that the best a guy with a not idea looks like a volunteer you know volunteer to lead it if we were a political party and somebody asked our platform we'd say we don't have one other than seek virtue in your community whatever that happens to be because how could we possibly know I mean we're not there so we encourage men in their communities and their organizations to be better leaders to be virtuous leaders in those nations to discern for themselves what needs to be done now we'll help you all day long as long as it's not gonna hurt anybody yeah Woolsey will show up for them oh yeah sure no as long as it's not you know obviously harmful you know I mean there's plenty things I do that I don't I don't really believe in the underlying cause as being a major problem but you know what I believe in the man who believes me so he comes to me he says I want to do this what do you think I said if you believe in it man do it oh you know I'll help you do it as best as I possibly can but don't ask me to believe in it I mean I believe in you and I think that's the difference between our organization and say you know other very fine organizations like the YMCA or Habitat for Humanity they have you know targets and outcomes and specific things that they want to see happen and they marshal resources and volunteers and money to try to make those happen and we're just the reverse of that we don't have anything that we think should happen other than people men should do things and to the degree we Harlan who we harness anything or motto men should do they should do things right you know that that's the solution to to our problem which is male is dormant male leadership you know we believe that in communities where the have ceased to lead and we have agreed to disagree agreed not to discuss as analyzation how it happened it doesn't matter to us how it happened it just happened so here we look at the landscape and we see men failing to lead like in the church where we were both members and somehow managed not to bump into each other over the course of seven years well the solution to that we believe is reinvigorated leadership and that's that's what we attack and that's what we think f3 does very well the f3 platform is it helps reinvigorate male leadership in a very organic way you all are starting a new outreach from that sort of teaching leadership based on f3 principles I'll talk a little bit more about that yeah so we call that the iron project and that refers to the the line in Proverbs about a certain sharpening one another as iron sharpens iron and that's been sort of a core principle of f3 so I think Dave alluded earlier there is a sister organization called fiha which stands for females in action that that sprang up alongside f3 about a year after we started and so Dave and I have pulled some folks from some leaders from fiha and some leaders from f3 and what we want to do is just basically take the leadership lessons that we've learned in f3 and help other organizations build their own leadership machines I mean so if you think about that's a clan who comes in one end of the f3 machine and comes out the other end an energized leader um we feel like there are a lot of organizations that could be doing that but don't do that very well and so we want to come in and help teach them how to build their own leadership development pipeline and empower their own people one of the things we haven't hit on this specifically but one of the really key attributes of f3 and fiha is that if you come in this is that second bail they was talking about earlier and we're expected to eventually leave a workout if you're gonna come and take part in this and it's gonna be free we want you to lead as well and and that that vision of shared leadership where it becomes you're working out the day that you actually lead it it's not Dave's in my workout anymore it's it's it's all of our workout that's that's something that's desperately needed and a lot of different organs so we try to get in and really show people how to draw on the different leadership possibilities in their people how to raise them up give them a chance to succeed but also a chance to fail and then after they've failed find another place for them to lead where they're they're better suited so that's that's kind of the vision and we're out there were working with corporations where we're going to be trying to work with some college athletic departments and and we're gonna be we're gonna be working with f3 and fear groups as well so the website for that is WWE iron project comm and we're also on twitter at at project iron with that been a great conversation guys let's say there's a guy listening to us to try an f3 workout where can they go to find out where they could WWF three-nation so the letter F the number 3 nation comm that is our national website you've got a map on there where you can put your zip code in and find the nearest workout we are currently primarily concentrated in the southeast but we made a big push into the Ohio River Valley this spring so we're now everywhere from Pittsburgh all the way across Indianapolis and the the I guess the south eastern suburbs we're gonna go to into Chicago this fall we were also down in Texas in Dallas San Antonio and Houston woody Austin this fall and we're going into st. Louis this fall as well and next you were we've got an outpost on the west coast in Seattle and we're gonna be working our way down the west coast and up into the northeast over the next couple of years awesome well Tim wittmeyer dave reading thank you so much free time it's been a pleasure absolutely thank you bright yeah thanks to the opportunity my guests today we're dave ready and tim wittmeyer they're the leaders of the f3 workout movement you can find out more information about them and even find a workout near you by going to f3 nation.com also check out their new leadership project is the iron project the iron project calm and check out our show notes AOM is / f3 you can find links to resources written delve deeper into this topic