OneTenHundred

Eric Boggs (00:02)
Eric, my friend, you well named fellow, how are you?

Erik Z. Severinghaus (00:06)
Well, and my name is appropriately spelled too, so I apologize for the C in yours. That must be a hard way to go through life.

Eric Boggs (00:12)
The classic C vs K argument, has been a very long time since we've discussed that. The CS for cool, I believe, was always my go-to. Where does this call find you? Physically and mentally, everywhere else.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (00:15)
Thank

Yeah.

Yeah, so working from home in Chicago. As you know, Eric, I grew up in North Carolina and moved to Chicago in 2006 and absolutely love it here. And we're about two weeks away from closing out what we think is going to be a gangbusters fiscal year with work and just on the other side of the holidays with family and all of that kind of stuff. so it feels like no year is boring.

And I feel like I'm sort of in that shoot of opening up and getting into the next year of my life, which is always an exciting phase.

Eric Boggs (01:01)
Yeah, we've had some pretty fun discussions internally at some of the folks at RepBoss. It's like, you know what, you go into January thinking like, heck yeah, it's January. And then January happens and it's like.

stretching out your arms a little bit from the long break and like the kids are sick and you get sick and it's cold outside and it's like you kind of got to like work your way into it. It's never like the shotgun blast into the year like you hope it is. At least that's my experience.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (01:27)
My most

important annual thing for about 22 years, I've been going out to Steamboat Springs with a variety of friends and family and other folks for a music festival and ski trip that always happens like January 6th through the 11th, like right in that timeframe. So my New Year's doesn't really start until I get back from my annual pilgrimage to Steamboat. And then about January 12th is my like real New Year's.

Eric Boggs (01:48)
I'll do it.

Good, good. Well, that sounds like fun. Yeah, I know. I'm hoping to make a trip out to Steamboat to visit our mutual friend this summer. So, yeah, yeah. So.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (01:54)
It is man, you should come with us sometime.

There you go. Also a good reason to get.

Eric Boggs (02:09)
You've climbed some mountains in your life. And I kinda wanna talk about that. The metaphor is both on the nose, scaling Everest and building businesses, but it's on the nose because it's like, accurate and resonant and true. And the thing that I like most about your career story and your book and perspective is,

there's like a sense of counterintuitiveness to a lot of it. Like when you're climbing a mountain, when you're building a business, there's this pressure to go, go, go and do, do. But that's not been your experience and that's not your teaching. So let's start there, if that's okay.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (02:54)
Yeah, I I love that. appreciate it. was the lesson. You know, there are lot of lessons I learned on Mount Everest and there were a lot of things that I realized the way people can people. People sort of they conflate climbing mountains and and you know, scaling businesses, scaling mountains, scaling businesses, right? Like like people tend to like like like pretend like these things are very similar in a lot of ways. And what I noticed when I was at Everest.

was that the advice that I was getting from the experts was the complete opposite of the advice that I get from the experts, I'm using air quotes here, in the entrepreneurial community. And so when I was at Everest, the focus of my guides and the expert climbers was very much on mitigate risk, be thoughtful, and be efficient to a fault.

rest and recover because you're gonna need your energy. And like I was the dumb ass, I hope I can say that on your podcast. I was the dumb ass that was like, I wanted to win every stage of the like walk up to Everest, right? And I wanted to go faster and I always wanted to do more. It was like the classic entrepreneurial do more faster, right? And I had this so ingrained in my mind.

Eric Boggs (04:00)
You can. We'll allow it.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (04:19)
and my guides had to almost like do an intervention with me. And keep in mind, like I'm on a climbing expedition with a bunch of necessarily type A, high achieving athletes because we're all there to climb Mount Everest together. And I was still the outlier of the like go, go, go, do, do, do. And my guides were like, dude, you are gonna burn yourself to a crisp and you're gonna fail. And they said, stop, rest, recover. I promise you're gonna use all that energy.

but use it strategically and efficiently, right? And that was my big warning. And then you come back and I get on LinkedIn and you read all these LinkedIn influencers and all of them have all of these stories about how they're doing more faster, they're working harder, they're working harder than you are, they're not sleeping, they're hustling harder. Yeah, exactly, they love to grind, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And what I realized is the advice of the people that actually know

Eric Boggs (05:05)
Yeah, I wake up at 5 a.m. and cold plunge it from 5 to 517 and then I, yeah.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (05:16)
What they're talking about is the polar opposite of the do more faster.

Eric Boggs (05:21)
Yeah, go slow to go fast, kind of.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (05:22)
Exactly.

And be efficient.

Eric Boggs (05:25)
Yeah, yeah. The analogy continues to kind of resonate for me. I've never been on Everest. I've done a lot of hiking, right? Like my mountaineering is limited to East Coast Appalachian Trail section hikes. And I mean, I've had some pretty unpleasant moments on those hikes. Certainly not Everest, but I know that at the top of Mount Everest,

There's a lot of trash and there's some dead bodies up there. How does, and probably a lot more trash and dead bodies in the business Everest than there are on the actual Everest. How does the analogy play out there? The people that climbed the mountain and didn't make it down, is it luck, preparedness, and how does that apply to?

Folks like you and me and folks that might be listening to this.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (06:23)
Yeah, it's all the above and I want to be really careful to separate thoughtfully the figurative versus the literal when we talk about death and the death zone and things like that. I actually start the book by saying that Mount Everest was the, so I did see dead bodies. I saw dead bodies lowered down next to me as I was rappelling down the low sea phase. mean, there were about a half a dozen or a dozen people that died on Everest the year that I was there, which makes it a very safe year in the typical annals of.

of Mount Everest. And, you know, for me personally, Mount Everest was the second, I had a couple kind of hairy experiences, nothing that I ever thought I was really gonna like die die, but like a couple of like, man, I'm not sure how I'm gonna get out of this one. It was the second closest that I've ever felt to dying. And the first for me was during my entrepreneurial journey. It was building a company called Simple Relevance, where

I had wrapped so much of my identity into the business that when it became clear that the business wasn't going to succeed, like I lost my ability to understand who I was. you know, candidly, at certain points lost the will to live. And that's a really, really scary feeling. And the tragic statistics around entrepreneurship are not only do 75 percent of our

businesses die the figurative death of not returning capital to shareholders and ultimately getting to outcomes that aren't financially helpful to us. But we as entrepreneurs also have three times the rate of addiction and twice the rate of suicidality of the usual population. And so there is both the figurative risk of death of how do we make sure the business doesn't die and how do we make sure it's a financially successful outcome.

And then there is the literal side of it of how do we take care of our bodies? How do we take care of our minds so that we ultimately get what we want out of this journey? those dangers are obviously at the forefront when you're on Mount Everest. You're thinking about that a lot. You're thinking about the preparedness. You're trying to make sure that you're lucky. Like all those things factor in, right? You have to be prepared. You have to work hard. You also have to be lucky. Like all of that has to come together.

It's not all inside of your control. The mountain gets a say in whether you climb it too. And it's no different than in our entrepreneurial journeys. As you know very well, Eric, you can do everything right and still fail. That's just part of this game that we're playing.

Eric Boggs (09:01)
Yeah, the mountain gets a say. The market gets a say. And there's nothing you can do about it. And certainly in markets, just brutally unforgiving and can change on a dime. Share and appreciate your honesty. And I wouldn't have asked the question if I didn't know what the answer was going to be. You know, I've been there too, brother. Like I've been there.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (09:03)
That's exactly right. That's exactly right.

Eric Boggs (09:31)
you know, many times and it feels like once you go into that dark place as an owner or founder of just profound unhappiness and just not knowing how you're gonna work yourself out of it, all the way into like what you experienced, it feels like it's always with you. And, you know, when you were in that dark place, how did you find your way out of it?

Erik Z. Severinghaus (10:00)
Yeah, so for me, and I always want to say that if you find yourself in these places, number one, please go talk to somebody, talk to friends, talk to doctors. Like have the courage to get the help that it took me a long time to go get. There's the honest answer of how I first started dealing with it, which number one, if you'd asked me, do I have a mental health issue? I would have said, absolutely not.

Eric Boggs (10:30)
Yeah.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (10:31)
I was performing at a reasonably high level. I was cogent. was coherent. You know, I considered people that had a mental health issue to be people that lived under bridges or people that screamed at me on the train, right? And coherently, not high functioning entrepreneurs. And so for me, it was wrapped up in a few different things. The first thing was

I started to feel a profound amount of guilt and shame. And I was very fixated on the fact, I was just terrified of the fact that I was going to not win and I was going to not return capital to the people that had invested in me. I mean, look, I've lost, like I played team sports in my life and you don't always win the championship. And I was certainly not always the best athlete on the team, but like I had never lost in a business context.

Eric Boggs (11:29)
Yeah,

like lost, lost, like meaningful lost.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (11:30)
the way, the way this felt

to lose. Yeah. And, and I just didn't know how to deal with it. and so I felt shame every time I started to feel happiness or joy. I would stamp that part of my being out because I felt guilty about feeling joy. It was like, how can you feel happy? How can you feel relaxed? Don't you know that you're failing? Like

Eric Boggs (11:57)
Yeah.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (11:58)
Like screw you loser. Like, don't you know that you're failing? How, how, how can you, how can you be so self indulgent that you sit here and relax and feel joy? You should be working. You should be hustling. You should be grinding. You should be doing more in some way, or form. And so that sense of like profound guilt and shame. And I didn't really feel like I could talk about it because

There was a lot of like, yeah, but these are all choices I made. Nobody told me I had to do this. This was all something I wanted to do. In fact, people told me not to do it and I went and did it anyway. yeah.

Eric Boggs (12:36)
Yeah. Yeah, I created this mess. hired these people.

I made these decisions. It's all on me. I have to it's all on me and there's no one else I can. Yeah. Yeah.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (12:44)
Yeah.

And by the way, there are starving children in Africa and there are people with way less quote unquote privilege than my white heteronormative like whatever use all the different things that people want to remind like like like that society wants to tell us that we can't ever feel bad thoughts because you know, we're privileged in some capacity. And I internalized a bunch of that crap. And I basically just decided that like,

not only were my problems existential, they were simultaneously existential to my being and also things that I didn't have a right to feel. And so you try and square that circle of like, I don't even know who I am as a person. I'm now a failure, which is something I never thought I'd be. And I don't even really feel like I can talk about it, because that also feels self-indulgent.

And all of sudden, my brain couldn't find a way out of the mess. It couldn't find a way, it couldn't find a series of actions to solve the problem that it found acceptable. And so what started to feel like the acceptable course of action was like, I don't know, man, what if I just slipped and had an accident and then just didn't wake up, right?

Eric Boggs (14:09)
Yeah.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (14:10)
And so like you asked me, what did I do? Well, there were a few things that I did just on instinct that I later came to find out are actually really, really valuable. The first thing was I made sure I didn't have any firearms. I didn't have access to drugs that had high toxicity. I did a lot of things. The average, I think, time from like suicidal ideation to completion of suicide is something like six or seven minutes. And research shows that if you can prolong that period, the survivorship rates go off the charts.

Eric Boggs (14:34)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (14:40)
And so like, I didn't know that I had a problem, but I also knew that I had a problem enough.

Eric Boggs (14:45)
Yeah,

you knew enough to at least take some preventative action.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (14:49)
Yeah. Yeah, I'll smoke pot, but

I'm not gonna have stuff around that might kill me. Like it was, was that kind of, that like, like if I end up in a dark place, I don't want to be able to get to the game over before I have the chance to recover was like a lot of my thinking.

Eric Boggs (14:55)
Yo.

Yeah,

a quick aside, mean, I've known you for a long time. We've known each other for a long time. Simple Relevance was an old school rep boss client, like way back when. I was interacting with you when you were going through this and I had no idea. I had no idea. And I get it, I would not have told anyone. You just said you didn't know or think that that was even a thing.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (15:13)
Yes.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean...

Yeah, to that in, Eric, most of my friends, family, people who were very, very, very close to me, who kind of later read about it, I mean, they would have all said the same thing. My issue was manifesting, I was shorter with friends, I was less patient.

I was less kind, I was less thoughtful. I think I probably have friends that would say, yeah, you were kind of a jerk for a year there. So there was a little bit of that. I wouldn't say that I wasn't manifesting any symptoms, but I didn't even know what I was going through myself. I couldn't figure out how to even understand it in my own brain, and so I wasn't talking to anybody about

Eric Boggs (16:16)
Yeah, yeah. So you recognized that things weren't good. You took some steps to like some self-preservation action. What were the baby steps after that?

Erik Z. Severinghaus (16:32)
Yeah, so it kind of started with like, there were a couple of quotes that I would read them and they would like almost make me cry. And like the poem, If by Rudyard Kipling, Teddy Roosevelt's Man in the Arena speech. Yeah, yeah, like I could still recite it word for word and like, and so what I really started to do is like, I had no concept of what was going on, but

but I knew that I needed someplace to start debugging what was happening inside. And so I kind of started with those and I started getting more into philosophy. I started getting more into Buddhism and Stoicism and I just started reading, I started reading a lot less TechCrunch and Pando Daily and started reading a lot more of the classics. And for me, I started to, now at the time,

I also, I sold Simple Relevance, which like simultaneously helped and hurt the situation that I was in. I realized everything just felt tense and wrong. so, at some point, I don't even really know why I did it, but at some point I also started to talk to a therapist. And the therapist, which by the way, I cannot recommend highly enough for people in the entrepreneurial journey. my God.

Eric Boggs (17:45)
Yeah.

cosine on that.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (17:54)
the therapist helped me start to unwind. I do know why did it. I went through a nasty breakup and I've been through multiple breakups and I felt like I was repeating the same pattern in my relationships. And so it wasn't really a like fix what's going on in my head so much as like I have this pattern of behavior that I'm recognizing and I need to figure out how do I break this pattern and I couldn't figure out how to break it myself. And so I went to a therapist and I was like, like there's gotta be something here. Can you help me debug and like break this pattern?

Eric Boggs (18:22)
Yeah.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (18:23)
And so the therapist, unbelievably helpful. The reading and what I came to realize, there was this moment of like, was like, Rudyard Kipling, that guy's a poet. Teddy Roosevelt, that guy was like, Teddy Roosevelt, whatever, you could read all the books on him. He, you can't even classify him as whatever, right? And it's like, somehow those people have felt and captured this feeling that I feel that I see that like,

Eric Boggs (18:27)
Yeah.

He's a category on his own. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (18:52)
Nobody else from what I can tell can I have a conversation with. And they almost became like my confidants. And then it became like Marcus Aurelius. And I started to read a bunch of his stuff. And I was like, all right, so this is all external to me. It's not internal to me. And then, so like that, and then like Buddhism, like Tao Te Ching, like a bunch of that stuff. I just started down this.

rabbit hole of like reading all these and they all like hit me in a whole different way and so it was a combination of a whole lot of self-discovery and some therapy and then probably sprinkle in some meditation which I started to get pretty serious about and like all of that together started to allow me to kind of start to unwind a bunch of these knots

Eric Boggs (19:23)
Yeah.

Yeah,

yeah, yeah.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (19:44)
The only thing I'll say is I was self-medicating from a whole bunch of the anxiety with a lot of booze and various other substances. And I started to develop a much healthier relationship. I've never been a teetotaler. I'm not a dry January spiritual adherent. But I did start to develop a much, much better understanding of like

why I was drinking, why I was using substances, what was it that was leading me to some of that? And like, was I using some of it as a shield to hide behind or a way to, you know, whatever. And so once I started to understand a lot of those dynamics, then I started to unwind a lot of that too. And I started to be way, way, way more intentional about how I think about some of those.

Eric Boggs (20:16)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, well, it's...

You can't, if you're a mess internally, you can't address the mess externally, right? And you know, from what you described, you slowed down, you took care of yourself, you took care of your body, and that let you start to heal Eric, the person, and that is what's Eric externally.

that's had a lot of success and has been able to do a lot of other amazing things. That's inspiring to hear me.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (21:14)
Yeah,

other big point that I want to touch on, because it's kind of where we began, is I came to realize what bullshit it was to put all of this stress onto myself. And candidly, I came to authentically forgive myself. And this was what I think prompted yours and my conversation here. It was a LinkedIn conversation we had around this.

Eric Boggs (21:38)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (21:41)
I learned how, and I use the word learned intentionally because I do believe it's a learned skill. I learned how and relearned how to forgive myself for making mistakes, to recognize that I wasn't perfect as a CEO, as CEO of Simple Relevance, and that's okay. Perfection's an unattainable goal. And as I go through this phase of the journey,

you know, now running a new company. I try very hard to be the opposite of that. I try very hard. It's like opposite George, right? Like, like what would Eric of the past done? All right. Well, Eric of the past would not have allowed himself to feel a modicum of joy because things aren't going perfectly. Current Eric is very much of the like, like we have to be serious. We have to be focused. Everything remains imperfect and we need to work hard to fix it. This is an unforgiving game. The laws of capitalism are unforgiving.

Eric Boggs (22:20)
you

Yeah. Yeah.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (22:40)
and we either succeed or we fail, that's a tautology, but we either work hard and figure out how to make this thing work or we're gonna have to stop playing this game at some point. That's the reality of a venture-backed However, none of that means that we shouldn't feel joy and happiness along the way, that we shouldn't relax, that we shouldn't all of that kind of stuff. so that has very much been a part of the ethos that I am admittedly imperfect at.

Eric Boggs (22:54)
Yep.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (23:07)
I still get tight, still get anxious, I still get frustrated. My team will tell you I can be a little bit of a hard ass at times. But I'm trying very hard to bring a smile and a joyful disposition to what is a lot of very hard.

Eric Boggs (23:13)
Yeah.

Well, it's the pros perspective on this, right? Like the mountain has a say, right? Like, you you can show up with an amazing team and a great set of ideas, but markets change and tastes change and unforeseen things happen in the world that are gonna have a far greater impact on your business success than your smarts your background or whatever else you think that it might be. And...

Erik Z. Severinghaus (23:27)
All right.

Eric Boggs (23:51)
accepting that and letting go of the hubris and the ego. Man, that's hard. That's hard. I'm 44 years old and it's hard. I hope that I'm 84 years old one day and can at least acknowledge that I made some progress, but it's hard, man.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (24:09)
And what I'll say, what I've come to appreciate in the entrepreneurial journey, like what's the point of all of this anyway? Right? So like, what I have come to appreciate is for me, the fact that it's hard is the point. Like, this is the whetstone that allows me to sharpen the sword of.

How do I put the ego aside? How do I accept some of the reality of life? How do I be a better communicator? How do I be a better person? How do I be kinder? How do I be better at forgiveness? How do I take these existential and cardinal virtues that humanity has understood since time immemorial are critical and it is the point of our time in this body with this consciousness on this planet?

How do I get better at that? Well, what I have come to find is like the entrepreneurial journey, like the reason I missed it so much when I wasn't in it is because I wasn't moving up on that ladder at all. And so now like I try to, I try again, imperfectly to really have this perspective of like embracing and appreciating the fact that it is so hard because it's that.

It's like the fact that your foe is so well trained and like this mountain is so difficult to climb. Like that's what makes it the point, right? It's the cliche of Sir Edmund Hillary. It's not in the mountain we climb, it's ourselves, right? And like, it's no different in this journey than it is in any other.

Eric Boggs (25:40)
Yeah.

Yeah, the thing that you wrote on my, on LinkedIn, explicitly give myself permission to be happy despite things being imperfect. mean, tattoo that right here. Like that's, I mean, that is a summation of a lot of it. And that's a summation of a lot of it for, so my wife is really different from me. I mean, it's probably been a long time since, since you've been around Kelly, but you know Kelly, Kelly knows you.

She's what I describe as easy happy. She doesn't have these issues. Like when the house is a wreck and the kids are screaming and whatever, like she is zen. Like she can be happy in that. I am incapable. I'm hard happy. I'm very hard to be happy. And it took me a long time to understand that. what I didn't realize until recently that you said very well is you actually have to let yourself.

be happy. otherwise like it's unattainable. It's so elusive. You will never have it because something is always wrong. Something is always some charts always pointed the wrong way. Some kids always like screaming about something. And so you just have to let yourself be happy.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (27:01)
It's hilarious to hear you say that. I certainly do remember Kelly and absolutely lovely, right? Similar to you, opposites attract, right? I married my wife Dana who edited my book many times over. And it's hilarious because when she, probably the chapter in the book that most resonates with people when they read it is talking about imposter syndrome.

and I have people from all walks of life, every modality, nothing to do with entrepreneurs, and they wanna talk about imposter syndrome. And Dana read the chapter on imposter syndrome, and she looked at me and said, is that a real thing? Do you think anybody other than you has ever felt this? So, this just comes so naturally to Dana, and it is just the absolute opposite for me. I have to have a protocol.

Eric Boggs (27:53)
Yeah.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (28:00)
and a framework and an intellectual understanding to get the rest of my being there.

Eric Boggs (28:05)
Yeah, yeah. wanna ask one last question, talking point here, and you alluded to it. And it's about the privilege of successful heteronormative white American guys talking about their shit. And it's complicated, right?

Drew Howson just recorded a podcast with Lenny, the Lenny podcast guy. And if you haven't listened to it, you should. You will identify deeply. And it's pretty amazing to hear Drew Howson talk about it because he is as good as it gets in terms of founder, operator, and he struggled with all of this that we've described. And then he kind of slips in a line that was like, okay.

He's like, well yeah, I had to just get away. And so we went to our house in Hawaii and I was like, okay, okay buddy. And I'm not denying his struggles, your struggles, my struggles, but it's, don't know. I don't know if guilt is the word that I feel. Maybe it's just an awareness of it that's complicated. I think it can be true that a lot of people have problems way, worse than me in part because they don't have any money and they don't have.

they have financial stress in their life. And also like my shit is my shit and your shit is your shit and that doesn't make it any different. But I wanna get your take on that because I know that you're kind of fluent in these matters and it's an area where you spend a lot of time thinking and talking and writing.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (29:40)
Yeah, yeah, so I mean, here's the thing, right?

Bye.

I am a huge believer that all of us, whatever circle you want to draw, we all in this world have a tremendous amount of privilege. We have a lot more going for us. Like you can always point to somebody and go, I have it way better than that person does. We all.

Like we all have, like compare, I think the line is comparison is the thief of joy. And so, you know, without getting political, I've never liked the idea of let's all line up together in a line on who has more privilege than the other one based on height, weight, sex, gender, skin color.

Eric Boggs (30:23)
Sure.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (30:42)
Et cetera. Now, again, that's an easy thing for a straight white guy to say. I get it. I hear it. I understand it. There's a lot of reasons that I don't take a megaphone and like wade into these issues. You know, a lot of times I'm not sure anybody really wants to hear or care what I have to say about it. Since you asked me, Eric, what I will say is comparison is the thief of joy. And that is a universal human experience.

So no matter who we are, we can look at people that have more on a variety of dimensions and we can look at people who have less on a variety of dimensions. None of that changes. And by the way, we can look at people contemporaneously, the people that we exist on the planet with right now. We could look at ourselves historically.

Eric Boggs (31:28)
yeah,

I throw that one at my kids all the time.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (31:31)
Cool.

My favorite line to use with my kids whenever they say something isn't fair is I say, know what's really not fair is how much more you have than everybody else. And so if you want life to be fair, I can make it more fair. But by the way, let's take the mean global caloric input for children on this planet. I can restrict you to that amount of calories. And we'll see whether you want life to be fair or not. Right?

so for me, like what, what I had to realize is I can simultaneously be very, very grateful for the tremendous number of blessings that I have time, space, living in this country. Like I can be unapologetically grateful for the fact that like, I have a life that I very, very much enjoy living. And I'm not going to apologize for that ever and anywhere.

I can also recognize that there are things in my life that I perceive to be problems that I have to figure out how do I solve. you you can take it all the way back to like Jesus Christ dying on the cross and saying, you know, forgive others for what they've done. They know not what they do. You know, here's a guy going through a terrible, terrible ordeal being foisted upon him.

you know, not worried about feeling sorry for himself, you know, trying to figure out how does he make the world a better place by driving forgiveness into other people, right? And so I would pull all that back around to say that like, I don't think any of this stuff's mutually exclusive. To me, the problem that we get into, the problem I got into, so let me take it out of the world and let me personalize it back to me. The problem I got into was I refused to acknowledge and I refused

to stare down the very real issues that I was facing. And I hid behind a variety of tropes that I had internalized as a way of avoiding the very real problems that I had. Once I realized that I could both be grateful for what I have and I could recognize that I had some things that I had to work on and I could go spend energy working on those things and I didn't need to worry about what anybody else thought about it. I could just go do it.

Eric Boggs (33:44)
Yep.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (33:58)
and I put away all the excuses, well then it was way easier to untie a lot of those knots.

Eric Boggs (34:03)
Yeah, that was therapist lesson number one for me. frankly, one of the things that got me to a therapist was things are going so well for me, but I'm unhappy. And I feel bad because I'm unhappy because my dad grew up in a dirt floor house with no heat. who am I to complain about that?

You know, like no one in my family went away to college. There's a lot of like where I come from and who I am and yeah, and it was my therapist that was basically like, you know what, that's fine. And you know what, the thing that you need to learn is all of those things can be true at the same time.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (34:43)
Right. And the thing I'll add to that, I know we're way over time here, but I'll let you edit it as you see. The thing I would add to it is like, I try to be really thoughtful and sensitive. I'll tell you, like one of my pet peeves in life is like rich white guys that sit around and all they do is complain about taxes and like complain about the thing that they don't have. Okay. And like not say that I've never complained about taxes in my life, but like

Eric Boggs (34:47)
Now you're going to. This is all going in. This is good.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (35:12)
I try to be sensitive and thoughtful about the things that I have and the way that that may come across in terms of what it is I complain about. That being said, the human journey that we are all on, the Joseph Campbell hero's journey of like, how do we face down whatever dragons happen to be lurking in the caves?

that we are all on that exact same journey together. Regardless of skin color, regardless of gender, regardless of income bracket, we're all in the same human journey in a lot of ways. And so the recognition that we're in it, the recognition that it's part of our life, that's just accepting reality and ignoring that.

It just doesn't make any sense, right? And so on the one hand, like I don't complain about the material stuff to your point because hell man, I've got it pretty good and it doesn't, like I don't think it makes a lot of sense to sit and complain about that. I don't think it's where it sets the right example. I don't think it's the right mindset for me to have. And it's not the stuff that drives it anyway, right? On the other hand, the like, all right, I'm going to be real and acknowledge that I'm trying to figure out.

for the time I have on this planet, how do I best live it? How do I experience joy? How do I bring that joy to others? How do I be more generous? How do I be more kind? How do I embody and live those cardinal virtues? Like, I will say unabashedly that I'm imperfect at that. It still bothers me that I'm not good enough at it. And I'm still working really, really hard to get there. And like, there's a lot of problems that I'm still trying to figure out how do I solve. And there's a lot of wisdom I want to get from others, because I'm still not there.

Eric Boggs (37:06)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a journey and a process. You might say it's like climbing a

Eric, I appreciate all this, I really do. I appreciate the depth and the consideration and the thoughtfulness in the way that you communicate on these issues. And honestly, I think that the best thing that you or I or anyone can do that is kind of a little further into this founder entrepreneurial journey than others is to just talk about the reality of the struggle and the reality of the process and how it's unavoidable. So thank you for that. I do wanna wrap up with one more question.

What have you been listening to lately?

Erik Z. Severinghaus (37:51)
what have I been listening to lately?

Eric Boggs (37:58)
Yeah.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (37:58)
I

just got back from Steamboat and I will plug the Wilder Blue played a show that absolutely blew my mind. and it did you know the Wilder Blue Eric? I know you like good music. Yeah, go check it out. Paul Eason and Zane Williams. Paul's the lead guitar player. Zane's the lead singer.

Eric Boggs (38:15)
I just wrote it down and I will listen to it as we hang up.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (38:26)
They both have a great solo catalog with them as well. They came together for the Wilder Blue and you'll like it, Eric.

Eric Boggs (38:35)
All right, yeah, I know that we have very similar tastes, certainly in Americana and country. So I figured you didn't.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (38:40)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And you ought to come

out to Steamboat with me. You'll like that too.

Eric Boggs (38:44)
Yeah, for real. I've only skied out west once. I've been mostly a North Carolina ice skier, so like...

Erik Z. Severinghaus (38:54)
Well, you know, come out, listen to the music and enjoy the skiing on the side.

Eric Boggs (38:57)
Yeah,

you told me the dates. Pinch me in for 2026. All right. All right, yeah, there it is. It's going to be on the internet. It's on the internet. We have to do it now. All right. Thanks, man. I'll see you later. Talk to you later. I'm going to hit stop, we can. I do want to ask you about one more thing.

Erik Z. Severinghaus (38:59)
Yeah, game on, I'm gonna send you an email. You all heard it, it's been documented now, you've gotta do it. You and Kelly both.