speaker-0 (00:03.598)
Hello everyone and welcome to Catching Foxes, a podcast that dares to ask, can you just stop releasing stuff for three to four months and will and while also doing inconsistent episodes for twelve months before that? And will people still support you on Patreon? We are happy to tell you that the answer is yes, this is Catching Foxes. I am Luke coming at you from a place that Rachel said is not as sad as she expected. Gomer.

speaker-1 (00:28.878)
Hey Luke. Luke, I'm doing okay. Doing okay. How are you?

speaker-0 (00:33.282)
Yeah. You know, I got eight hours of sleep last night in forty three. I decided it's time to start getting eight hours of sleep at night, and I think that might be the source of a multitude of problems, me not getting eight hours of sleep. So turns out that's a waffle homer.

speaker-1 (00:50.56)
That's a walk. Can I ask you a question about your sleep? Yeah, sure. Now you have a very large, pronounced nose. What? W when you sleep at night Gosh, I missed you so much. When you sleep at night, are you a nose breather and do you snore?

speaker-0 (01:08.108)
I am a mouth breezer. A bit of sorry. I am a mouth breather. I try to breathe through my nose, but I just can't help it. And according to Everly, I snore very, very loudly.

speaker-1 (01:20.566)
Okay. So

speaker-0 (01:22.7)
Sometimes. Sometimes.

speaker-1 (01:24.8)
Okay. So I'm a I'm a brutal mouth breather. Breather. What? And I snore so loudly it shakes the rafters of my house and I don't even have rafters. it's it's awful, right? So I'm I'm watching these videos 'cause I'm morbidly obese and I'm watching these videos and like how to understand this doctor is like he does a lot of stuff for men over forty. And he just said he's like, Look, do you snore loudly?

violently all night long. He's like, you probably have sleep apnea. You know, you can't lose weight. You can't control your cortisol levels. If you're choking yourself to death all night long, you need to get a solid seven or eight hours of sleep. You need to do this. And so I was like, okay, I am going to focus on improving my sleep because I know that like according to everyone on the airplane that sits next to me, when I fall asleep, I'm choking to death.

And sawing lights. This one guy goes, this one guy getting off the plane. We're getting off the plane, so everyone's like standing up, you know, and we're a couple aisles ahead, so w the the people are still standing up. And the guy goes, Excuse me, sir, can I ask you a question? And I go, sure. And he goes, Are you are you do you own a sawmill or a a like a lumber yard? And I was like, no, no, and he goes

Because you had sawing logs this whole time. And I was like, What the hell? It was so funny. And I was so ticked off. I was like, my gosh, was I snoring? And he's like, Were you snoring? I think people in the first class were complaining, right? I was like, I am so sorry. That is so embarrassing and his wife's like, Bill, stop. Bill used to snore all the time. It's sweet. It remind it was nostalgic for me. And I'm like, This is with my eyes agape, right?

And then one day I was I was doing a men's conference in Michigan and I said, I go, you know, I have that dad superpower where I can sleep anywhere. You know, I was like, I'll sit there and just be at a movie that's stupid with my kids and I'll just put my head down and go to sleep. And and I said, and when I snore, my kids will elbow me, Dad, you fell asleep, and I'm What did I? even though it was totally on purpose. And so the the guy taking me to the airport after the men's stock was like,

speaker-1 (03:45.644)
Hey, I'm a dentist and what you're describing, you probably have sleep apnea due to your largeness of weight and the way you describe sleeping anywhere all the time immediately. That's because you don't actually get a restful night's sleep, and I'm like, What? So I started looking into all this stuff and now Luke, I have a new YouTube religion. Are you ready?

speaker-0 (04:09.761)
boy, here we go. K yeah, I knew it. There's gonna be something.

speaker-1 (04:11.662)
I own books now. I own books.

speaker-0 (04:18.574)
How much okay, really, really quick to everyone knows how how much money did you spend on Clash of Clans again?

Back and forth. Okay. Sorry. Keep on going.

speaker-1 (04:28.686)
That was like

speaker-1 (04:33.102)
Hey, tell me how many how much money have you spent on woodworking and how many shelves and desks have you actually built? two thousand dollars and zero. shoot. Now that you say the quiet part out loud, it kinda feels like I'm the one with the problem.

Ugh Yeah. So So that's so funny. So y you know, last year was the year of health for me, right? Remember? That was my theme. I I do. And I went to the doctor once and then it completely ignored everything. Then I had appendicitis and then then a doctor ripped out my staples without Novocaine or lidocaine or anything like that. It was fun. no, so I w I I I I have since gone back to the doctor. I have died

speaker-0 (05:06.926)
I

speaker-1 (05:26.956)
Yes, I have diagnosed hypertension.

speaker-0 (05:30.11)
no, me too.

speaker-1 (05:31.692)
I have to take blood pressure medicine, right? You ready to? This is such an old man thing. Now I'm on the blood pressure medic

speaker-0 (05:38.24)
Do wanna do you wanna compare meds really quick? I've got I have to get a refill, so I left my two empty bottles on the counter as a Dear Luke, please do this. For the love of all that's good, please do this.

speaker-1 (05:46.958)
What is your what is the name of your of your blood pressure medicine? We're gonna compare blood pressure.

speaker-0 (05:51.926)
What it's come to. I no, this is for my anxiety. Good old omelinciproll, can't imagine why. I have amlodipine and then there's one with the B, I forget. But I'm doing a lot better now. So like like my blood pressure is actually really, really good.

speaker-1 (06:09.878)
Okay, so when my dad was in the hospital, okay, so this is kind of like my journey, right? Sure. My dad's in the hospital. He has like fifteen medicines at home, and I had to they said, What's all of his prescriptions? So I go and we take all of his pills and we put them in a bag, right? We bring up to the hospital and they're like, Okay, you can take this home. I go, you don't want these? And they say, No, we have our own pharmacy. We give them our pills. And then I realized that's how they get ya. That's how they get ya, because they charge you a thousand dollars a pill basically.

So, we go and I'm going through my dad's stuff and I take photos and I upload them to Claude and it's like what what do these things do? What are they for? And it like spells it all out and then as I'm journeying with my dad going through his my chart and stuff like that, I see like his health decline, right? Like the these markers, like so it's like, Okay, now this medication is being used and now this medication is being used. And they're constantly chasing after all these problems because of his, you know, declining health and all that stuff. And then

you I'm I'm leaving the doctor and I'm looking at one of the medicines and I'm like, why does this look familiar? And then I go and I look in my medicine cabinet and that's the same blood pressure medicine that my dad is on I am on. Now my dad never went on blood pressure medicine until he you know probably like four years ago when he had a bloody nose that wouldn't stop and they realized his blood pressure was two hundred thirty. My gosh. Yeah, yeah yeah stroke level. Right? Anything over two hundred or stroke well anything over

two ten, something like that. Stroke level.

speaker-0 (07:40.236)
If you're at a 180 you have to go to the hospital. Ask me why I know that. Sorry, keep on going. Because I went and got a liquid IV drip in 2020 and they're like, your blood pressure is a 175. we can't give this to you unless it goes down. And if it goes over this, you have to go to the hospital. And I was like, my. Can't imagine why it's why it's this high. Go on.

speaker-1 (07:47.212)
Luke, why do you know that?

speaker-1 (08:07.992)
Please pour more salt in my f no,

speaker-0 (08:10.486)
So an old marriage later.

speaker-0 (08:18.958)
speaker-1 (08:21.082)
So that was like a wake up call seeing that like I shared this stuff with my dad. And I was talking with Dave Van Vickel and I said, Hey like what kind of weight training do you do? Like what what would you recommend? Blah blah blah and he starts talking about like I forget that Dave not only being a heavy lifter, w is also like a taekwondo champion and all of this stuff. So he's like

speaker-0 (08:40.29)
Yeah. Much better man than the two of us combined.

speaker-1 (08:42.762)
combined and multiplied. And he he was telling me the stuff that he does. He goes, Yeah, I do like heavy lifting one day a week. I'm like, I thought that's all you did. And he goes, No, no, no. Then I take my heavy bag that he has that he punches and kicks and stuff. He goes, then I do crawls. He he does his neck exercise where he takes his heavy punching bag, throws it on the ground and pushes it with his head while crawling on all fours.

And he pushes it with his head and neck to get all this

speaker-0 (09:12.802)
That would literally kill me. What

speaker-1 (09:14.67)
Well I mean he's just saying all this he was in a knife fight recently and he has to go to court. Yeah, yeah. People tried to stab him to death and What or a guy did and he beat the hell out of him. I got I got Let me tell you the story now. I like his stories are so good. So he's so this is Dave. Yeah, this is why Dave is already ten times better than us. So he has he's driving his handicapped van.

speaker-0 (09:28.366)
Okay.

speaker-0 (09:36.046)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (09:43.512)
You know, for his handicapped children. He's alone. He's driving it into the ghetto in Pittsburgh because the back is full of groceries, because he pays for the groceries for a family that can't afford it. He was such a good person. And he drives it every every two weeks. He fills his car up with groceries and drives it to their house. Okay. Already you're just like, This guy, frickin' this guy, love this guy. So he goes and he does that. Then he so he's driving on the way to their house

And he's and he comes out and he sees this l large woman dash across the street right in front of him, and then a man charge after her and he slams on the brakes and the man like he almost hits the guy and he turns and he looks at the guy and he lays on the horn and the guy looks at him and he has a knife, like a kitchen knife, and he bangs on the hood of the car and he like cusses Dave out, and then he goes after the woman across the street, and Dave rolls down the window and he goes, Dude, not he's Leave that woman alone right now, and the guy tells him off, you know, it's a more expletives.

And Dave pulls the car over, parks it, opens the door, and he says, I said leave that woman alone. And the the guy's like, You better not come over, I'll kill you. And the woman is now in her car, and she has the window or the door shut. That's why Dave like had time to park. And the guy's like banging on the window and stuff, but she didn't lock the door. So he gets the door open. Dave runs across and he has the knife out. Dave runs over. The guy turns and looks, and the woman's screaming. And Dave, like, what does he do? He like shoves him off.

And he's like, put the knife down and leave. And the guy's like, Are you nuts? I'm gonna kill you. And he lunged at Dave.

speaker-0 (11:21.55)
Call nine one one but not for you. But not for me or something like that. Yeah. So I messed that up.

speaker-1 (11:28.45)
Yeah, yeah, but not for me. Yeah. So he goes and Dave like knocks the knife out of his hand, grabs him, puts him in a hole, picks him up, and drops him as hard as he can on his head and heard a crack and let the guy go. Guy's out cold. Throws the guy off, and Dave looks at his watch and he's like, he turns and the woman's on the phone with the cops and she's like, Some white boy just ran across and he's helping me And he rolls the window down and he says, Here's the knife.

Wait for the cops and all of a sudden he hears sirens like kind of in the distance and he's like, Okay, I think the cops are coming. I have to go. I have no time for this. I have no time for this.

speaker-0 (12:04.844)
He he just bit the shit out of a guy probably wanted for questioning.

speaker-1 (12:11.79)
Yeah, and the w and she's Well that the the the 911 person wants to talk to you. So he takes the phone and she goes, sir, and he goes, Look, here's my name. My name is Dave Van Vickel, here's my phone number, here's where I live. Do you have all that information? Yes, sir. And he goes, I have to go. I have to go right now, but I will answer any questions you guys have. This is what happened. Because the lady was like so hysterical. So Dave like very calmly explained, he's like she's like, Sir, what is going on there? And he's he like calmly explained it. He's like, But I have to go. We can't do this anymore.

I got she's Sir, you are not allowed to leave the scene. And he goes, I have to go right now. You have my information. I'm out. And so he left. And he went, he went to the house and he dropped off groceries. And he's like, Hey guys, I'm sorry I'm late. I just stopped a knife fight. And he said, Guess what the family guess what their first comments to him were after he said, I just dropped off or I just got in a knife fight. The first thing they said was, Did anything happen to our groceries?

speaker-0 (13:03.789)
Who'd you kill?

speaker-0 (13:09.91)
no. Well you know, hey, listen. That's how that's how charity works. It's not about how it's not about their their reactions, about your disposition and your actions.

speaker-1 (13:18.402)
Just about the right thing, doing the right thing. I just think of Mother Teresa where, you know, she's like doing all this people like spit on her as she's saving their lives. And you're like, Okay, okay. Okay. So anywho, so he goes and does that. And he's waiting for the phone call. He's waiting for the phone call. He's waiting for the phone call. Nothing ever happens. He's like, All right. So he stays up kind of late, like eleven or twelve for him, and then he goes to bed and at one o'clock in the morning they call him.

And they're like, Yeah, we just really wanna get this stuff situated. He's like, Why are you calling me at one o'clock in the morning? Are you stupid? And he's like, Well, the guy was just booked. He's like, Why was he just booked? This happened, you know, fifteen hours ago and they're like, He just got out of the hospital.

speaker-1 (14:00.75)
And Dave goes, okay. And he goes, We just want to get this wrapped up. He's like, The guy, the guy's a repeat offender. He's a horrible guy. He's like, We just want your story of events. He goes, I already gave my story of events. You already know it. It's already recorded on the nine one one call. And he's Sir, just tell it to us again, please. And so he goes and he walks through everything and he's like, Dude, that's crazy. So Dave's like, Yeah, yeah. And it's one o'clock in the morning. I got kids with special needs. Like, shut up. Leave me alone.

And the guy's like, Well, okay, so I'm trying to think of the funny thing the cops said that Dave like had to tell him off. I'm like, Dave, your life is so weird. he goes, he goes, so the guy's all right, he's out of the hospital. And he goes, no, we got him out of the hospital to book him and he had to go right back. He's like, he's got multiple broken bones and all that stuff. And so Dave's like, Well, what hospital's he at? And he tells him So Dave the next day, after he takes care of stuff, he drives down to the hospital to go see the guy.

speaker-0 (14:55.16)
Did he pray with

speaker-1 (14:55.658)
I mean, this is crazy. So he goes to go see the guy and he meets and he goes to the nurse's station's like, Hey, is so and so here? And they're like, he is, but he's in a we had to give he's in too much pain, so we had to give him medicine to knock him out, and he just fell asleep, and Dave's like, okay. And she's like, He's gonna be asleep for hours. Are you a family member or a friend? And he goes, friend, I guess. And then the doctor heard and came over and he's like, Hey man, it's really great.

To see that you really loved him that much to come and visit him. And he goes, it's really good. At times like this, people need this. And he goes, Sure. And he just he's like, I prayed a like a decade of the rosary that I left. And then yeah, he's so then he's telling me this. I go, Whatever happened to that story. And he goes, I'm in the middle of he's like, the only vacation my family gets, I take all my kids, we go to the beach. Do you understand how hard it is to get two kids with wheelchairs onto the

speaker-0 (15:51.126)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (15:52.158)
but they love it. So we go to the beach, we're out there, all you know, drove from, you know, Pittsburgh to wherever, New Jersey, something like that. New Jersey. And they're on the shore and they're enjoying it. And he said, and then he gets a phone call from the police again and they're like, Yeah, we need you to come in and testify tomorrow and he's like, What? And they're like, Yeah, you should have got a summons two days ago And he's like, Yeah, no, I'm not doing that And the guy's like, This is an official summons by the jury and he's like

Yeah, cool. I'm in New Jersey. Why don't you guys get in your car and drive over to come see me? Goodbye. I will t I I will be home on Thursday. I will be at the trial on Friday. And the the the guy's like, What the hell is going on? He's like, That's what's gonna happen. He hangs up on him. And then he did. He had to go testify.

speaker-0 (16:40.884)
I love Dave. Dave is a man

speaker-1 (16:43.215)
What is this? What is his life? I can't wait.

speaker-0 (16:47.062)
I'm on YouTube 'cause I need to get more sleep.

speaker-1 (16:53.75)
All right, and we also want to thank our good friend Faith Mosier. Faith helps clients that often feel stuck or hit the wall with other therapists or approaches to therapy. They finally felt movement connection in the beginning of real healing. She is a licensed clinical social worker, a certified EMDR therapist therapist, and a ketamine assisted psychotherapy provider.

she uses a variety of other modalities to focus on the integration between mind, body, and spirit. This is really important because she specializes in complicated childhood or childhood trauma, particularly during the holidays, recent or ongoing traumatic events, disconnection from yourself or other people, anxiety and panic, grief and loss, and disassociative disorders. For clients ages ten plus, anywhere in Texas, because her office is located in Dallas, and that's the rules.

She offers typical fifty minute sessions and extended extensive sessions. When you're ready to take the next step on your healing journey and come home to yourself, find Faith on her website at Dallashealinghouse.com slash Faith or send her an email at faith at Dallashealing House dot com. And we want to give a shout out to Faith. She's awesome. And thank you, Faith, for sponsoring this portion of catching foxes.

What did you do yesterday? Well, I brought a poor family groceries, but then on the way, I totally forgot I had to stop a knife fight and save a woman's life. Huh? Yeah, and I hospitalized the guy. One move, he hospitalized him. I

speaker-0 (18:28.462)
I played Disney's Dreamlight Valley for too long last night and went to bed too late. That's what I did. I'm not a man.

speaker-1 (18:37.014)
I went to go see the Odyssey with my wife. I did. I did. Well, the one problem was we couldn't meet halfway at a theater because you live in Dayton, Ohio and I live in Texas. Yeah, I I I'm gonna give it a three and a half, maybe four out of five. There were some scenes that I thought were absolutely incredible. Abs I mean like the visually it's visually stunning. It's beautifully done. It's kinda horror. There's a lot of horror scenes.

speaker-0 (18:39.42)
you went without me. How it?

speaker-0 (18:47.555)
There.

speaker-0 (19:03.489)
I don't like being scared.

speaker-1 (19:04.832)
Someone said someone said, when is Nolan gonna do a horror movie? And this is the closest like it comes to any of his movies as a horror movie. You know, so there's no nudity or anything like that. it's you know, mo it's like true monsters. They don't try to demythologize that stuff. There's like real monsters in it and you know, the Cyclops scene, that's like brutal.

There's the the grossest scene is Cersei, the witch Cersei turning them into pigs, 'cause she like shoves her hands down their throat and pulls their noses out and turns them into you know, is fighting men into pigs. It's brutal. Like some of that but I'll tell you what, you know, it was actually funny. I hate when Hollywood demythologizes mythological tales, like where they try to turn it into like you know, they do that to everything. They did it to like Troy is one of those examples, like

You know, Achilles is just a great warrior. He's not a demigod or whatever, you know. Yeah. So it's stuff like that that like bother me, 'cause it's like, no, that's part of the glory of the story. I think you know, they call it magic instead of saying the gods and stuff. And there's a lot of like the I hate the gods, I'm against the gods stuff, but Yeah, so there were there was a lot of great sequences and elements within it, and like true so like I was saying, like the demythologized elements. So they didn't really like I don't I don't know, it's kinda hard to tell. Like all the stuff that you saw in the

I okay. The race they call it what like colorblind casting. That didn't bother me at all. Like, you know, like the the you know, having black people in ancient Greece and having, you know, Helen of Troy, like she all the stuff that you that was like controversial, the are characters that are barely in the movie, right? Because this is the Odyssey, not the Iliad. So Helen of Troy, her character is barely in it, you know, maybe like five minutes of runtime, screen time.

But I will say, like, the whole Elliot Page character, like that was weird. That was

speaker-0 (21:05.088)
Elliot Pages in it? I I don't know what

speaker-1 (21:06.894)
yeah. And it is so bizarre. And even the framing of some of the line like you're the bravest man I know. That was one of the parts that you're like But like her voice is so bizarre. Like it's just bizarre and so tiny because she was a tiny woman, like actress like an inception, like she you know, and then to have her play this male character of it's funny it's funny because

The character is a boy, basically like a maybe a sixteen year old or eighteen year old at the oldest.

But

She has the face of a of an adult manish sort of, right? Not an eighteen year old, but she has the body height of like a pubescent boy, right? So it's just like this everything about it and her the weird voice and all that stuff is just it's just jarring. But the scenes were all good. Like, I mean, I I thought it was a I thought it was a really good movie. And I'll tell you what, the last thirty minutes of the you've read the Odyssey, right?

You're So when Odysseus comes home, like all of that is my was my favorite part of the movie. All of that. And it was awesome. And when he's in the hall with the suitors, that's I I mean, and the drumbeat, the soundtrack is this drum beat that just gets faster and faster as the chaos erupts and it's just like boom, boom, boom and I'm just like

speaker-0 (22:19.49)
Familiar with it. Okay. Yep. Yep.

speaker-0 (22:30.157)
Nice.

speaker-1 (22:49.23)
and then a guy in front of me turned on his cell phone and I had nothing but violent thoughts for that man. I wanted to destroy him. And I was like It's the music, but I don't care. I have bloodlust upon me. Right, so you can see how My wife

speaker-0 (23:01.944)
My vengeance? Where is-

Meanwhile I'm just shanned pounding beers and just in a fight. sorry, here.

speaker-1 (23:09.934)
Where is mine, lady? I'm over here getting effed up.

speaker-0 (23:16.076)
It's it's it's like the scene in the family guy, where like Lois like gets really jacked and she like gets into a fight and she beats up this woman, then she like she goes to Peter and grabs his groin and goes, These are mine, this is where my babies come from and then Peter's like like very sh in shame. Yeah. Yeah sorry anyways, go on. Do you know

speaker-1 (23:34.934)
You know who said that? You know where that line comes from? This is my this is where my baby O.J. Simpson was drunk at a party and walked up and grabbed Nicole Simpson there and said that. Now how do you think about that family of family good?

speaker-0 (23:38.972)
No.

speaker-0 (23:51.828)
I mean still works. Yeah.

perfect.

speaker-1 (23:59.49)
Yeah, so anywho, anywho, so Odyssey was awesome. It's just me and Shannon going to see it because my kids really want to see it 'cause they've all read The Odyssey. And so I'm like, maybe 'cause I'm hearing horror stories and it's rated R, so I'm glad my kids didn't see it. I think some of the scenes would be too much. But

speaker-0 (24:13.164)
You you showed them what, wh wh when they were very, very young, like the Dark Knight or something?

speaker-1 (24:17.772)
Well, they weren't very, very young. my oldest was like twelve.

speaker-0 (24:21.998)
Yeah, drink his water.

speaker-1 (24:23.916)
What? was like six or seven.

speaker-0 (24:26.59)
okay. I what did I show in in the in the pantheon of Luke being a bad dad? I was trying to show Everly a movie and I was like, This is yeah, this is a bit much, and so I stopped it. I can't remember what it was. It happens every couple months. Yeah.

speaker-1 (24:41.186)
Yeah. So so all all of this all of this this whole story, right, was started because I'm doing blood pressure medicine. You're dead

speaker-0 (24:48.622)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (24:52.386)
Yeah. We're b but Yeah, but it's my it's my dad's blood pressure medicine. And it's like, I'm going down the same road as my dad. And one of the things like and and th this is what I love about my dad. Like my dad was so present when ever when we were there, right? All all that stuff's awesome. In fact, my dad this is awkward. My dad is present with us now in that bag on the floor there. This is my dad.

speaker-0 (25:18.254)
I've got yeah, yeah. Collection of ashes now at at my mom's house. It's fine. We've got the dogs, Dad, my grandma.

speaker-1 (25:20.353)
I'm waiting for the

speaker-1 (25:29.484)
Put him in a columbarium, so we need to get him at this cathedral. I just hasn't called me back for us to put it and it's like, the ashes are ready, you can pick it up now and I'm like I have my dad in a tote bag. You want to talk about

speaker-0 (25:42.006)
It's a it's a moving experience.

speaker-1 (25:43.99)
Yeah. So I went to go pick up. Went to go pick up and I held up the tote bag and I took a photo and I sent it to Brian and Chris, my brothers, and just said, Here's Dad. And Brian, I don't think, understood what I was saying, and then cr my brother Chris just wrote, OMG. Are you serious? And I put I put him on the shotgun and was driving home and and I was like, What do I do with my like

It reminds me of the time when I had I was going on a retreat and they were gonna do adoration, so I had to bring the host, the priest ass, if I would bring the host. So I had a consecrated host, you know, wrapped, you know, obviously in the pics and then wrapped and and placed next to me. And I'm just like, What I said to Father David, I was like, What do I do? And he's like, Drive in prayer. Like, don't play music, don't watch YouTube videos. And I'm like, But what else am I gonna do when I drive?

speaker-0 (26:40.974)
What do you mean? do you mean? I can't drive and watch it. Sorry. Come again? Come on. Come on. Come on.

speaker-1 (26:46.296)
So so I it felt like that and our friend Thomas Yeager had bought me one of those he bought me a rugged rosary. You know the have you heard of that brand Rugged Rosaries? So he bought me and they're the our father beads are skulls. Not like sugar skulls, like Mexican sugar skulls, but they're skulls. And it's a memento mori rosary, that's why he bought it for me. Nice

speaker-0 (27:13.91)
That's awesome.

speaker-1 (27:14.934)
Yeah. And, you know, like remember your death. there's a line from let's see if I can bring it up real quick. CRAC thirty eight. so there's a beautiful thing about physicians and health. And I have known of this verse for a long time. It's like why Catholics are not like the weirdos who think going to doctors is a sign that you don't have faith in Jesus' healing power, right? And it's all about like God's way of healing is through the

the pharmacist and the physician and all this stuff, and that's Cirach thirty eight. But then after that, here is this here's this advice from Jesus Ben Syrac. My son, let your tears fall for the dead, and as one who is suffering grievously begin to lament. Lay out his body with the honor due to him, and do not neglect his burial. Let your weeping be bitter and your wailing fervent. Observe the mourning according to his merit, for one day or two, to avoid criticism, then be comforted for your sorrow.

For sorrow results in death, and sorrows of the heart saps one's strength. In calamity, sorrow continues, and the life of the poor man weighs down his heart. Do not give your heart to sorrow. Drive it away. Remembering the end of your life. Do not forget there is no coming back. You do the dead no good, and injure yours and you injure yourself. Remember quote, remember my doom, for yours is like it. Yesterday it was mine, today it was yours.

When the dead is at rest, let his remembrance cease and be comforted for him when his spirit has departed. And that's like very like practical advice. It might sound a little cold to us today, like, you know, day for a day or two Cirach chapter thirty-eight. you know, a day or two to avoid criticism, then be comforted for your sorrow. But, you know, when I'm I'm listening to that, and and and and I I know we talked about this before. I don't want to make this podcast about my dad's death and stuff.

But I I

speaker-0 (29:10.998)
We talked about it but we haven't talked about it w on the show. So if you feel like you need No no no, we've talked about it in real life.

speaker-1 (29:14.257)
we have it. Okay. I thought we did. Okay.

speaker-1 (29:19.224)
Gross. We can't monetize that. Anyhow, so okay, so here here's a couple things that I've learned along the way. number one, people who I I want to die a long and drawn out way, like my dad. he had basically no pain except some acute spikes, but mostly he was pain free. there's a lot of humiliation that occurs in the medical sphere, right? You're you're stripped naked often, women are bathing you, women or men are bathing you, and you know, that's awkward and

speaker-0 (29:20.723)
I know.

speaker-1 (29:48.866)
You you're shitting yourself and pissing on yourself and all this stuff. But it's funny how my dad was so afraid of that and then he just got used to that. Right? Like, yeah, okay. Hey, I went to the bathroom. You tell the nurses to come in. And so anywho, th there's so many lessons that I learned, but the biggest lesson was actually taught to us by when when Katie died and we had her husband on David Garcia, and he talked about being a widower.

And and then he got married pretty quickly afterwards and stuff, and people were like, I'm shocked. did he really ever love her? And you're like, people say all these horrible things. And the reality is this, he said, You didn't mourn my wife until she died. I've been living with her cancer for a year and a half at stage four. We were preparing for her death the entire time. Yeah. You know, and Dave says the same thing about his wife, Amber. It was like four years of this sort of Damocles hanging over her head. And he said, like

you mourn all this stuff and and for me, so I w I was just like, you know, I'm there for six weeks, my dad's health was like, you know, cliff, cliff, cliff, cliff. And and you just keep like all these things going back and forth between a rehab hospital and the ER and all this stuff. And I I realized a couple of things and one of those things that I realized was like I was mourning my dad I had the grief before he died. Right? But that grief, because

I ha I you know, I've had people in my life tell me this the whole time. No one ever brings up conversations with the dead dead and dying or with the dying before they die about their dying. So do it. Like talk about it. And I noticed none of the doctors and none of the nurses would be like, Hey, you're really trending down, you need to get your fares in order. No one ever says that. No one ever says except for my dad's nephrologist, his kidney doctor. And my dad loved this woman and Doctor Vupali. And she was the only one that was like, You're not doing well and th things are getting worse.

You know, she's the only one that would say that. She would say that to me, pull me aside, blah, blah, blah. But all the my charts and all the doctor's notes would say that. They would track all this stuff, you know, prognosis poor, but they would never say that. So I would have these con I'm the only one, right, in my dad's life that would sit there and I would do a good news, bad news with my dad at the end of every time that I was visiting him. Sit at the foot of his bed. Dad, do you want to hear everything? The good news and the bad news. Yes, I do. Okay. First the good news. Here's five things.

speaker-1 (32:11.724)
Now the bad news. Here's twelve things, right? And it was always that way. It was always more bad news than good news. So I'm going through this stuff with my dad and all these things. And I learned, like, I I would every time I'd leave the hospital, I would be bawling my eyes out. You know, or maybe not every time, but pretty much every time. And there's this thing called anticipatory grief. Did we talk about this? Anticipatory grief? Okay, so anticipatory grief is when you have a loved one who's slowly dying and you know the like there's no coming back, right? This is an actively dying.

speaker-0 (32:32.802)
Think so.

speaker-1 (32:41.824)
situation, but it's like prolonged. So you're already grieving their death, but they're not dead. So you're anticipating it, right? We human creatures are so fascinating with our ability to understand the future. but when you have anticipatory grief, there's another sneaky layer of guilt because they're not dead. So we feel guilty that we're grieving someone who's still alive as if they were dead.

speaker-0 (33:10.339)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (33:11.208)
And so I just learned like when when that was brought to my attention, I was like, so that's that's the complex thing that I'm going through right now. Like that's that's the dealio that I'm getting. And so I began to like really think about this and think through this. And so I asked a friend who did like a lot of like end of life care, and I watched a couple YouTube videos. There's a wonderful nurse. I can't remember her name, but she does she's a nurse, hospice nurse, and she does like in home patients. And she talked about

like what it's like when people die and how to have a good death and all this. And, you know, obviously our Catholic tradition. I got I have Dr. Han's book, Hope to Die. And I was going through that. And I you know, I did a we did a study in EKSB on the sacraments of anointing of the sick. And so I had read a bunch of books on that. So I'm like, yeah, like I know what to have on and I and I noticed like my mom couldn't do it. Right? She couldn't have these convers she couldn't talk about it. So I would have these conversations with my dad and I loved it. Honestly, at one point I set my phone up and hit record and my dad said the most beautiful

Like I I said, Dad, I don't think you're you're going to last very long. I don't know if you have four weeks or six weeks or whatever, but and he just, you know and then he just started talking, he's like, Mike, I love you so much. You you know he says all these beautiful things that you want to hear from your dad on his deathbed, right? But then he like clicks over and just starts praising Shannon. You know, like just beautiful stuff. And then my kids, by name, all the things that he loves about them. Just beautiful stuff, beautiful stuff.

And and and just and then praising me for having such a good family and all this. And he does it for my brothers, right? He says all these beautiful things. And it's like, dude, like there's there's nothing left. Like my brother came down, he got to say goodbye. All of his kids came down and got to say goodbye while my dad was perfectly lucid and all that stuff. And they got to say their I love you's and their goodbyes, and it was very serious and very clear. so like I learned a lot from that. Like

Don't be afraid of the death conversation. grief, grief comes often if someone's dying slowly and it wasn't a sudden thing. Grief can come very can come early and you might feel guilty about it, but don't don't worry about that guilty feeling. Use it to have the hard conversations. and I will also say I I think this is I I think this is the probably the most powerful super

speaker-0 (35:27.715)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (35:36.738)
S the most important superpower you can have in life is humor. So, you know, there's so much tension in these rooms. Like my dad's in the ER, there's all this stuff. So I would walk in and I would have my computer out and I'm looking, I'm like, Hey, the test results just came in. And my mom and dad like look at me and they're like, What? And I go, It turns out the last test came back positive. I said, Dad, I'm sorry, but you're gay.

And he would be like, What? And he would just start dying laughing. And my mom would be like, What the hell is the matter with you? Right. And then she would start laughing. And then we were like, No, really, what does the test say? And then we would go through all this stuff and like all this and it was like the thing to break the tension so that then hard things could be said. And then like and this is like I could say like stupid stuff like that because this like I know my family.

And these are the conversations, like the stupid stuff that I say to make moments lighter. And, you know, I'm the I'm the peacemaker in the family. But like at this moment, it was just like like like I would say like when me and my brother are gonna my brothers were talking about the will in front of my dad, right? That's a weird conversation to have. Right. And so I said, you know, my dad's explaining how this the will is very simple, and my mom, you know, and my dad's in a hospital bed, wires and tubes coming out. I said, Listen, dad, I just want I want you to know, like,

Dad, Brian, like Brian's not going to be in town. You he lives in Kansas. I said, Dad, Brian, I just want everyone to understand, like, whatever my role is, I want to be a hundred percent clear, a hundred percent transparent. My only thing that I want to do to help out is keep dad's trembling hand steady enough to cross out Brian's name from the will. That's all I want. You know, and and stuff like that that like

Like and then we're having all these brutally honest conversations of why some should have more money than the others and you know, all this stuff. And no there's zero animosity. There's zero weird

speaker-0 (37:43.168)
It's w and when we're able to do that, I've one of the one of my f absol like favorite parts of my job when it comes to raising money is actually planned giving. Yeah. Most people are actually very okay talking about their wills and stuff. Like I find I actually I find a lot of them they bring it up to me. And there's something really powerful like to I I think it's the thing that people are s at times scared to talk about. But if you do it with like you want the best outcome possible for everyone involved

It's really easy and it's good. It's really good. It's r actually a really good thing to to talk about. It's it's a thing that I need to do like on my own here. and s and s and stuff and and and and like it's complicated, right? 'Cause I have to like involve Aaron in those conversations. Yeah. But that's you know, because of Everly, but that's okay. Like it's it's it's actually surprisingly I know it's it's it's it's weird to say it as a person whose job is to go and see if they want to give money to us in their will.

But they're beautiful convers every every time I've ever talked with anyone about it, it has been a beautiful conversation and I walk away grateful for being part of it.

speaker-1 (38:47.522)
Yeah, and like people are we're we're all afraid to talk about death, especially the death of someone that we do not want to die. Do not want them to die. So it's it's it's painful and awkward and all that stuff. But this is the you know, to reference one of our earlier episodes, this is the beauty that comes out of ashes, right? Like literally ashes right there. But the pain where difficult conversations can be had and it unleashes or releases

speaker-0 (38:53.538)
Yeah. Absolutely.

speaker-1 (39:17.248)
So much glory and grace and yeah. so I I I wouldn't trade any of those painful moments for for anything. I do I do say though, you need coaching a little bit. You need to kinda know what you're doing. You you should get some advice going into it because you you don't want to bring any undue pain or anxio un any undue suffering or anxiety into the situation. You don't want to make your loved one depressed, you know, more than they might already be.

So that's why like having like I had a couple questions, I had like ten questions prepared that I got from the nurse thing and other other like online things I was Googling, like, how do I have this conversation? What do I say next? You know? And I had these little discussion prompts, for lack of a better phrase. That's the exact accurate phrase. and we just kinda w and I just asked my dad and and we would talk for twenty minutes about one question and then sometimes we talk for thirty seconds about one question. And I got a full picture of

How he wanted to die, what he did and didn't want, when it's time for palliative care, shifting to hospice, you know, all of these things and stuff like that. And yeah, it was it was it was powerful and it was cool. And here's the deal. My f the funeral mass of my dad was so my favorite part was so the rosary that we did, we did a rosary and the office for the dead for evening prayer at my church.

And you know, it's the Anglican ordinary, it you know, it's kinda weird and stuff and not everyone's gonna be into it. Well, people were coming the funeral was on a Monday. people came in on the Sunday. And so they came to the vigil on Sunday night and there's like twenty people from my family and out of town, twenty, maybe thirty. You know, not a packed church is what I'm saying. When we finished the rosary right before the office for the dead, I turned my head and the church is like sixty percent full.

And it's just people from my community. Friends. Not and some are not even personal friends. They're just people from the community's like, hey, did you hear Gomer's dad died or Shannon's dad d father in law? Yeah. Okay, the r when's the rosary? Okay, it's tonight. Yeah, let's go and pray. Like they just showed up. Like a hundred people just showed up who have no relation to us other than good friends. And they came to the rosary. And then like two hundred people showed up for the funeral on top of

speaker-0 (41:23.395)
Did

speaker-1 (41:41.388)
family and people that came from out of town and stuff like that. Just from my community. They just showed up. How amazing it is. It's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. I loved it. Although I will say, if they weren't Catholic, some of you know family members or they've been away from the church. if they were used to like more like life teen mass,

speaker-0 (41:48.77)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (42:02.934)
They attended a funeral liturgy on hard mode. It was at Orientum. It was every long prayer. before the gospel there was him the I I I'm I'm gonna butcher the Latin but the dias whatever and it was ch and everything was chanted in in Latin. All the propers were in Latin. You know, I don't choose any of this if the pastor chooses it all. and everyone was in black.

All the priests, everyone, all the you know, we're all in black. My two boys served, were altar servers, which is my heart. My heart for that was so yeah, it was just so beautiful. And then Father David Husk gave the homily. My pastor, Father Fletcher, celebrated the liturgy, and it was the Anglican liturgy. And then Father Peter from w which he he says hi, by the way. Father Peter is a catching foxes fan. He and he he asked about you all the time. So I just saw him, he's How's your wife? How's your kids? How's your mom doing? And then he's like, So how's Luke?

He always asks about you. So Father Peter came and he con celebrated, even though he was hit by a car and was walking with the gosh. Yeah, he's he's incredible. He's one of the most he like helped start Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity priests and stuff. And now he's running he's the a chaplain and does so much work for our missionaries to the family program and stuff. He's incredible. He's so incredible. And he lives out here and he he finally got an apartment right across the street from where we work and he was stepped out in a car

Like I think took the corner too fast and like plowed into him at like twenty miles an hour and like straight up hit him.

speaker-0 (43:32.339)
He walking or or or was he in his car? my my god.

speaker-1 (43:35.106)
He was walking. walk yes. Yeah. I mean he's got screws and bolts and rods and pain and suffering. How old is he? Rehab and all this stuff. I don't know. I don't know. He's he's not he's not forty five. Okay. He's older. He's older. He's an older fella. Yeah. He's an incredible priest. He's so funny. He has a great sense of Hebrew, which is why he loves catching foxes. but he he so he con celebrated. I ha we had there's a woman who lives in Houston.

Who works at Ascension Press and Ascension Press sent flowers and then really cool. Like that's

speaker-0 (44:09.664)
I didn't even do that.

speaker-1 (44:11.766)
I know, I know. I'm I remember I did call you I'm still waiting for the Roman triptych poem from for my birthday. twel twelve twenty five years ago. no, a woman showed up and she's like, Hey Twenty nine years. And I said, Hey, how are you? And she said, I'm good. My name is I can't remember her name for the life of me. I feel like an idiot 'cause I've met her before. But she said, I'm I work at Ascension. I go, you're yeah, that's right. You work at Ascension, you're the Houston person I was told to meet up with and she goes, Yeah, yeah,

I just wanted to come on behalf of Ascension and just let you know that we love you and we're supporting you and we just want to be here for you. And and I'm like, Are you serious? And she's like, Yeah, I just just want to be here for you. And I'm like, That's incredible. And then all these Paradesis Day people came in and they drove all the way up from Houston and then, you know, some people from Saint Anthony's came and all this stuff. Wow. And it was just perfect. It was the bet my favorite moment. Father David Tomalee was awesome. I'm a little bummed it was only fourteen minutes long, but it's fine.

speaker-0 (45:05.091)
Mm-hmm.

speaker-1 (45:08.558)
was we carry so want. Yeah. We yeah. We walk we walk the casket out and the hearse is there. Right. So we have the body. He's cremated now, but we had the body at the funeral. And we get to the end and then it's my my my two brothers, me and my brother Brian's three oldest sons. And we all grab Pops

speaker-0 (45:11.438)
Is it part more I w

speaker-1 (45:36.054)
And turn and we walk him in and the guy says from the funeral home, he goes, Now just push the c the casket forward and send it to the man in front of you. And I just like he didn't say like, Now you're just gonna do hand over hand and feed him in there or something like that. Like the way like you're just gonna hand him forward to the man in front of you. And we did that. And it's and it's a lot heavier than you'd think 'cause my dad was like a wisp by the time he died.

And just to see like to feel that and to do that and then I walked backwards and just to see the hearse with the door closed, I looked to my right, there's my mom next to all the ultra servers and Thomas and Noah. And and I realized I'm standing next to Father Father David's on the other side, but I'm standing next to Father Fletcher, and then Father Fletcher begins the chant or begins the song of the Salve Regina.

And everyone is outside around you know, in the f steps of the chapel and kind of in a crescent shape around the hearse, and we're all just singing the Salve Regina. And it was and my sons, because they go to a you know, this classical school where we they learn how to sing, they all all my kids, all four of my kids know the Salve Regina in Latin, you know, without and they can sing it and they sing well. My all four of my kids are good singers. And they sang it and you know, and they're crying through tears, and I was like bawling and

But then I like you know, there's these moments where you have a snapshot of what's happening and you c you know you know that thing that you can't always turn it off where it's like you're participating in a thing but then you're observing yourself participating in a thing. Which is very frustrating sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's very frustrating sometimes. Yeah. 'Cause I'll be like, Am I crying enough? Am I crying too hard? Am I not you know like

speaker-0 (47:23.554)
to have a thought about like what I am experiencing as opposed to just experiencing it.

speaker-1 (47:27.896)
Yeah. And it was so funny, so like or not so funny, but that that was kinda happening. But I just look over and I just think of like what a blessing this is. This is how I wanna die. I wanna die this exact way. I want I want people singing the Salve Regina, I want them all there praying for me, you know, and at one point someone said to me, which was a little annoying, but they were critical of the liturgy.

And you know, people gotta have their opinions, right? It's it's tratty. I warned everyone. But I said, they're like, nah, you know, I just kinda wish the music was a little bit different, you know, you know, wish we had some more praise and worship and stuff, like to really feel it. And I said, That's because you keep thinking the funeral mass is for you.

It was like it for him. It was the worship of God, and it was for my father. It wasn't for you. In the sense of how you are to feel. You bring your feelings, but it's the worship of God. And it's the last time on earth my dad will ever be involved in the worship of God in this liturgy. Now, hopefully he's gazing at the Lamb of God, you know, sitting on the throne in glory.

But like this is this is what it's for. It's for my dad. That's why we're all dressed in black because we're doing penance and we're praying for his soul, you know, all these things. Like that's the the kind of Catholic thing. Yeah. And so anyw, I I I grieved I wept so hard. The two weeks before, especially when he was like he could barely speak and all that stuff. I wept so hard the day before, two days before the

You know, his day of Yeah. Yeah, the yeah, sorry, yeah, his funeral. The day of his funeral and then about two days after. I mean, just bitter, sad, lonely tears. And I would go, I would get the like this a big cup of water and I would sit outside and it's like ninety eight degrees, ninety percent humidity, and I would just sit in my back porch in the sun at noon and I would just sob and sob. But here's what I was able to do. I was able to keep it together.

speaker-0 (49:14.637)
His funeral.

speaker-1 (49:43.448)
For the most part, for my family. For my mom, so that she could grieve. This was my number one priority, that my mother and all those who loved my dad could grieve in whatever way they needed.

And I could give that gift to them by me taking on with my brother's help. Like don't don't mean it's like I did a lot of the stuff, but it wasn't just me alone. But if I can take everything upon myself, as much as I can upon myself, it gives them permission to just be. And, you know, to be honest, like the stuff that I was making decisions about, I loved 'cause it was an act of service. Cause my dad, before he died, he said he said to me,

You need to ca take care of your mother and I said, No, I know, I know, Dad And he said you need to take care and this is like like a month before he died. So he was like sp speaking fully verbal and stuff like that and he said, You know, you need to take care of your mother and so my mom went to go see him and stuff like that and then I came in the next day and he said, Mike, your mom told me all that you're doing for her and he's like, Thank you, thank you, thank you. You're doing so much. You're doing so much for her. Thank you.

And so then, you know, and then this is the time where I'm taking my dad's phone, getting all of his passwords, getting my mom's passwords, you know, going logging into their bank accounts to make sure there's nothing weird, calling I mean, I made dozens and dozens of phone calls to cancel stuff that my dad didn't even know he had signed up for, you know, in his you know, whatever but you

speaker-0 (51:14.84)
Get the catching foxes Patreon support going, right? Sure, sure. Okay, card.

speaker-1 (51:17.23)
Yeah, yeah, I just switch up to so am I. sorry. Hey friends, if you're a parish staff member or know the people who keep the parish running, you understand how overwhelming it can be. Managing spreadsheets, finances, sacramental records, and still finding time to engage parishioners is not easy. That's where Parish Soft comes in, built by Catholics for Catholics.

speaker-0 (51:23.0)
Jane, sorry, I you get that.

speaker-1 (51:45.272)
Parisoft is an all in one cloud bla blah blah ha ha you darn tootin' it is. Cloud-based see, I was trying to get a quick run. This is like a Mario run, right? So a cloud-based solution that simplifies parish life. From accounting and online giving to Sacramental Records and parishional c parishion or communication. Parasoft takes care of the details so you can focus on fostering discipleship and building your community. Let's be honest here, folks. Parish life is absolutely overwhelming.

Where you you juggle all this stuff all the time, and I can tell you as a parish employee, having an online database where everyone can access it if you're remote working, working in the office, you're just home for the weekend, you need to pull up a phone number to call a parent because of a confirmation retreat, blah blah blah. This is so important for you to modernize your books. I went somewhere and they were keeping all their records on an Excel spreadsheet. Yay, yay, yay, you do not want to do that. Join the more than twelve thousand. Join the more than

Than twelve thousand parishes of one hundred and eighty-five dioceses already using Parisoft. Visit Parisoft.com today and see how technology can strengthen the mission of your parish. That's ParisSoft.com. Thank you to Parisoft for sponsoring this portion of Catching Foxes. No, it's funny. because my dad's credit card expired that had his Patreon donation. I remember and I and he said, I need to switch that card. And I never I never thought about

speaker-0 (53:11.214)
A lot of other other people's

speaker-1 (53:13.184)
Yeah, and I was like, Dad I you know, Dad, it's fine. It's fine. Like, I'm not gonna do that. I'm you don't need to worry about it. But he did it on his own. But he did it on his own. And he put it on his credit card and I'm you know, I have to cancel his credit card. So I s I'm like, Okay, well I'll switch it over to the debit card, 'cause him and my mom want to do that, whatever. And but it was funny because I would check in to my dad's email account to go through his emails and he had so much like spam and they just target the elderly for some.

speaker-0 (53:42.251)
Yeah, yeah.

speaker-1 (53:43.31)
And there was your post.

speaker-1 (53:48.76)
that you did on Patreon and I was just like like it hit me, you know? Mm-hmm. 'Cause I wasn't I wasn't thinking about it. I wasn't expecting to see it. And there was just like I can't what did you say with I can't remember how you phrased it.

speaker-0 (54:07.83)
I just copied and pasted what you put on Facebook. 'Cause I don't really know like what yeah.

speaker-1 (54:15.412)
you put requiescent and pache, Donald Gormlight. And it was just it like the way you said it and the way like it hit in the little subject line, you know, I was just like okay, okay, wow, cool. Yeah, cool. And it's it's just a f it was a funny like reminder of my dad's support of everything I've done and been, all the choices I've made, you know.

And my faithfulness and all that stuff and trying to be a minister in the life of the church and do this stuff. It was just this beautiful kind of little reminder. And Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that was Yeah. No, I was just gonna say So that was it was that was like a beautiful post funeral not post funeral. Yeah, I think I did see it post funeral because No, it was right before the funeral because it was

speaker-0 (54:57.944)
Whatever.

speaker-1 (55:11.874)
You know, I wasn't getting on my dad's email anymore 'cause he had died. I'm not looking for test results and stuff, but

speaker-0 (55:17.954)
Yeah. I don't ever remember you saying like you know, in college you'll hear certain people talk about conversations they've had with your their dad about their career choice or different things like that or you know, whatever. I don't ever remember you s ever having a thing where your dad like, Do you really want to go down this road or anything? Or within ministry. Yeah. You always seem to be very supportive of like what you were doing.

speaker-1 (55:40.524)
Yeah, yeah. He knew I mean from the beginning, like, my son has to be if he's not a professor, he has to be a Catholic school teacher or youth minister or whatever. Yeah. I remember where one time my dad I was describing a life night where we were like, you know, playing silly games and stuff like that and my dad's just looking at me like what the hell are you talking about? And he goes, You know, Mike, I gotta tell ya. Now my dad, for those of you who don't know, shame. my dad was raised in Inner City, Philadelphia.

speaker-0 (56:08.686)
You should know by now, but yeah.

speaker-1 (56:09.728)
Yeah, you should know that by now, even if this is your first time listening. but my mom would always say, you know, we were poor, but your father was in poverty, and my dad's dad abandoned his family and all this stuff. And Yeah, yeah, yeah. It'd squish milk around an empty applesauce jar and that was what their treats were, right? And my dad so my dad looks at me he goes I gotta tell you, Mike, like kid wh he can I ask you a question? I'm like, Yeah, and he goes, Do kids do this? Do they play these games? I'm like, Yeah, you know.

speaker-0 (56:20.3)
Tell me the story about the applesauce.

speaker-1 (56:39.138)
Kids, they wanna have fun, you know, it's just silly games and stuff. And goes, I don't know, if it were me and my friends, I think we'd beat you up.

speaker-0 (56:46.178)
Ha ha ha.

speaker-1 (56:47.63)
And I was like kinda taken aback by that, but like also that's on brand. you can take a boy out Philly, can't take the Philly out of the boy. And I looked at my dad and and I kinda like took a second and I said, No, dad, that's not true. I said, if I was your you and your friend's youth minister, you would all be priests. And he was like, touche, touche

speaker-0 (56:54.691)
That's

speaker-0 (57:09.001)
Dosha you knucklehead.

I was trying to think of like some good memories I had of your dad and I think they all involved me having a cigarette with him. What I recall. Like at your wedding. We did that a couple of times. the one time at your house.

speaker-1 (57:18.659)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (57:22.402)
Yeah.

Yep. One of my favorite one of my favorite stories with my dad. So this guy his fine so my mom is freaking out because he never wrote down his passwords where the money is, he never did any of that. And she asked him to multiple times and he started to but never finished. I think because he forgot the passwords or who his touch point was and you know. Yeah. I think it just he got more confused in the confusion anxiety equals procrastination.

So I'm the one tracking all this stuff down. And he got an email when I first signed the emails from his one of his financial guys at Merrill Lynch. So I replied to him and said, Hey, just to let you know, my name's Michael Gormley. I'm copying my mom of this email. my dad is not doing well. He's in and out of the hospital, but things do not look good and we don't expect him to last the year. And he's like, my gosh, I'm so sorry to hear that. Keep me posted, you know, my my prayers for you and your family.

So I call this guy afterwards and I'm going through everything and I have a checklist of places that I have to call to notify my dad's death. And I so I call him up and I said, Hey Jeff, just want to let you know that my dad he did in fact pass. He goes, Yeah, you know, we received a notice through the Social Security administration and he's like, I'm so sorry, I should have called before he died and I sh I wish I could have gone to the funeral. I just didn't think of it. I'm dealing with my own family stuff and I'm like, Nah, that's fine. Like you're you're good. You're you're fine. And I was like, you know, like I wouldn't expect that of a finance guy.

And he goes, I really liked your dad. Your dad was a class act. Yeah. And I go, and I go, man, thank you for saying that. He goes, Did did he ever tell you the story of how we met? And I go, you know, he I think he did. Now that you're saying that, Jeff, I think he did, but I don't know what it was. What what was it? You gotta remind me. And he goes, So your dad worked at Shell Two Plaza in downtown Houston. I worked at Shell One Plaza and there was a certain area where we'd meet. And I go, a certain area?

speaker-0 (58:46.924)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (59:13.302)
And he goes, All right. It's like the dungeon where they put all the smokers, you know, the outside lounge that's like special. And it's like all of a sudden he's like, So I met your dad, I would see your dad like twice a day. He goes, you I'm the finance guy, I'm the you know, I make money by running people's accounts and stuff. He goes, I don't we're there to have a smoke break in the middle of the work day. I'm not there to like gin up business. He said, But there was this guy that would join us in the smoke break, and he would always ask me for financial advice. And I would give it to him, and at the end of every single time he would say

You know, I really should switch to you. I really should switch to you. You always give me free advice. You're always so great. I should I should really switch to you. But he's like, This went on for two years. And he never did. And I was like, Yeah, whatever. You know, well there's a lot of, you know, sales leads that go nowhere kind of thing. The maybes. And he said, One day your dad goes He goes, What the hell, man? You've been s I've been sitting here hearing you say this for two years. You're gonna are you gonna give your money to him or not? And he goes, You know what? Screw it.

I will give my money to you. And so he said he went ahead and

Like but he went ahead and gave the money it took a huge portion of his a huge portion of his retirement savings and transferred it over to this guy just because he was sick and tired of hearing this other dude. And I was like, dude, yeah, my dad did tell me that story. He's like, That's so funny and he's like, Yeah, I'm like I he's like, I saw your dad for like, you know, ten minutes twice a day for like ten years because we would smoke together. Awesome. that is too funny. That is too funny.

speaker-0 (01:00:47.278)
Stuff that w that we lose when we give up terrible habits. I'm trying to actually r so like what did your dad do at Shell? Like what was his job specifically?

speaker-1 (01:00:53.112)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (01:01:01.014)
Yeah, so he was the guy that would essentially he was in charge of the credit department, in terms of like when when huge companies buy millions of barrels or millions of dollars worth of oil of refined oil. So he used to be on the crude side, but now he's not. He was on the the product side. When they would buy refined oil he was the one that would like approve the credit lines.

speaker-0 (01:01:25.422)
Okay.

speaker-1 (01:01:27.022)
So like for instance, if you were if you were some like plastics manufacturer and you needed a million dollars worth of of certain type of refined product, you know, that was my dad. So he's on the refinery side. But it was he was shell trading USA, so he worked for the credits that then if you send someone a million dollar line of credit, you need to make sure that they can pay it back, that kind of stuff.

speaker-0 (01:01:50.71)
Yeah. So he would like analyze it and stuff and then Yeah, yeah, yeah. That sounds cool.

speaker-1 (01:01:53.506)
Yeah high school only education. Took some night classes. Took some ninth classes. Tolsa community college and kept correcting the professors, called them all idiots and left. He's like, No wonder you're a professor, you can't hang it in the business world for real. Like you don't understand a damn thing. He when he was f sixteen he had a full time job as a student, you know, in in high school. He worked evenings at a company and then

And then when he turned eighteen, no matter what day your birthday falls on, on your eighteenth birthday, my grandmother kicked you out of the house. 'Cause she was a single mother raising five, six kids. And so she gave you a hundred dollar bill, a new pair of khaki pants, I think he said, and handed it to him, hugged him, kissed him, and he left to move into an apartment.

And they all I mean, it's not like it was like a sudden like a at six o'clock in the morning she's dragging him out on his eighteenth birthday. No, so what happened what happened was you know, he but he worked eight hour days in the evening and when he was in high school and stuff like that. He he just worked for some corpor I I want to say he worked for some

speaker-0 (01:02:52.65)
But my drink!

speaker-0 (01:03:04.982)
What did he do?

speaker-1 (01:03:09.792)
Corporations like front office somewhere doing like paperwork, clerical work, but he got office skills. And then when he was like nineteen, he was hired by Skelly Oil, which was based out of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, which was then bought by Getty Oil, which was in Delaware. So he worked at Skelly for like five or six years, then Delaware moved him for one year, I think. And then Texaco bought

Getty and moved him to Tulsa. That's where I was born. He was there for 20 years. Then and so he he like used to do him and this guy started at Texaco. They were in the credit card department when gas credit cards were like a brand new thing, and he would call people to be a debt collector for it. He said that they were like calling me like, you know, you owe a thousand you got a thousand dollar balance, you're you know, six months late, you need to pay this, what can you pay?

And they would start cussing him out and he would open his drawer, put the phone in the drawer, shut the drawer, and he would like count to twenty. Are you done? So he would do this stuff. It's so funny. But yeah, then he became like he would just keep rising and the every time there would be like rounds of layoffs, he would always beat it. Right. He would always keep his job. Yeah. And and then so eventually it shifted his job out when Ec sh Texaco and Shell merged their they did a merger for the refineries, Equilan and Quiva Motiva.

And he got sent out to California. So that's when my dad was in LA area. Universal City was a big Texaco building. So I spent fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade out there in my summer times. And then in halfway through ninth grade, he moved to Houston. And then my tenth grade year, we moved to Houston on November first. November first, nineteen ninety eight. And Good year. So that's when that's like my dad's job. And then he just climbed to, you know, an upper, you know, mid level

management kind of guy. But so here my here's my favorite Don Gormley story. You ready for this? I think it's hilarious. I probably shouldn't tell it, but who cares? It's just a podcast. in the United Kingdom there is their their biggest purchaser of I think it's refined oil. I think that was the product. I don't I don't I don't think it was anything else. So they had these three huge tankers that would pick up from the refineries in like Louisiana or whatever and fill with oil and then f you know

speaker-1 (01:05:35.276)
boat him over to the UK. This woman calls my dad. She's like twenty five. she's been on the job for like two years and she only has one account, which is the biggest purchaser of of all of Shell's purchasers. They buy like twenty million dollars of product at once, right? This is a huge deal. Or I don't know how much. This is a huge deal. Well this woman, she only has one account and this is the one account that she manages 'cause it's their most

important account in a certain sense. And she starts crying on the phone to my dad. And she goes, Look, I don't know who and my dad's like, Whoa, whoa, this this isn't like credit. Like, what what is this for? Like you you you shouldn't be talking to me. And she goes, You're the only name that everyone has mentioned as someone who would back me up. She's like, my boss and my boss's boss are not helping me. He goes, okay, what's the problem? And she said, they haven't paid.

They haven't paid in months on their bill. They haven't paid a penny. And they owe us millions of dollars. And we just sent three tankers full of oil over to them. And she said, I had called and the they just like she's like, they don't respond to my emails. They don't respond to my phone calls. And she goes, I know they're just stalling because they can rack up more interest, you know, money on interest payments and stuff like that. And she's like, but I need to start collecting and I can't. And I feel like I'm gonna lose my job if I can't.

But my boss knows my boss about do what you can or whatever. And she goes, I don't know what to do. So then my dad's like, All right, all right. So he goes up to her office, he gets her accounts, he starts going through her account.

So he freezes their credit. The biggest I mean, just think about this. This is like the equivalent of like Walmart buying your stuff. And you're like, Yeah. And some guy on floor number seven of a fifty story building is like, Nope, no more Walmart. So he freezes their cr

speaker-0 (01:07:36.568)
So

speaker-1 (01:07:38.104)
So the guy, the CFO of this company, of this of this multi-billion dollar UK company, is furious, freezes their credit, and and then so like Shell is it's like Dutch Royal Shell is what you know is the full name. It's like Dutch and it's the UK and it's Houston. So when the UK calls, it's a big deal. Now this is not the company that I've been talking about this whole time. This is Shell.

The highest people in Shell are calling Houston about Donald Gormley. Like, what the hell is going on here? They told you and the lawyers call my dad. They're like, Unfreeze his accounts right now and he goes

speaker-1 (01:08:21.516)
No, I'm not going to. And he goes, Hey, can you do me a favor? You're a lawyer. Do you know to read a contract? Okay, are they in breach of our contract? Well, yeah, but that's not the point. that's not the point. Okay, that's funny. Click. And he would just hang up. He'd be like, No. No. And the girl came the called him up and she's like, you know, like just do whatever they say. I don't want you to lose your job. And he goes, What the hell do I care? I'm seventy one years old.

So he's let's go in so that his boss's boss calls him in. He's like, Don, what the heck are you doing, man? And he's like, Look, you're not supporting your employee. Her bosses are not supporting her. This is how many tens of millions of dollars that they owe us that they've never paid. And they're not they're not even being respectful. And they're like, this is a big deal. Well, the CFO of that company called, you know, and they they worked out something, the guy said.

this is this is what happens in the this is now, because this was like on a Friday. This is now a whole weekend. It's like five days of drama, of international drama. The CFO was so pissed, he turned the oil tankers around mid Atlantic and sent them back to Louisiana. my gosh. Do I smell it? It's like this huge thing. And so the guy so the CFO of the company of my dad's company calls him in as like or I think it was or maybe through my dad's boss or boss's boss, and he says, Look, this is what we want, this is what we're gonna do.

They're they're agreed that they're gonna make all their back payments and they're gonna start doing whatever. But and we've already turned the ships back around and they're going back to the UK. It's gonna add another like twenty grand worth of U-turns. And he said all he wants is an apology from

speaker-0 (01:10:02.306)
The CFO of the other company wants an apology from him.

speaker-1 (01:10:04.566)
The CFO and I think the CEO, something like that. And my dad goes, Yeah, not gonna happen. You can apologize all day long. He's like, Don, you pissed this guy off. You had no right to do that. He goes, I had no right. Dinner contract, you violated the contract five, six times. He didn't respond to any of the emails. You did not support your employees doing their job, even though they came to you for help. I won't apologize to anyone. You can do it all day long. And if you put me on the phone with them,

I'm gonna tell him exactly what I think. Okay, okay, okay. I'll apologize. So my dad never never apologized. Everything worked out. And our final sponsor today is the Cloyster Ignation Prayer app. This is an Ignation Retreat for the times you can't get away on retreat, a personal spiritual experience. That's cloister Ignation Prayer dot org.

These are video based lessons from seasoned retreat directors. Ain't nothing better than the Ignatian spiritual exercises, let's be honest. It is designed to fit into your regular life, into the cloister of your home. Man, I love that. I just love the way that sounds. Bonus content to aid your faith journey, audio lessons from retreat directors, stations at the cross, video meditation, which is great for Lent, remastered episodes of Fulton Sheen's show, rated time for his beatification, baby.

Subscriptions benefit the Cloister on the Platte, a nonprofit Ignation Retreat Center in Omaha, which I think I visited fairly recently. That's awesome. good calls to action are this. Okay. At first I thought it was saying good calls to good. Well, thanks for highlighting it, buddy. Thanks for highlighting it. No. learn more. We're good at this ten years in.

speaker-0 (01:11:54.306)
Hehehehe.

speaker-1 (01:11:57.518)
Clo learn more at Cloysters Ignation Prayer dot org or sign up to watch the first lesson for free, or you can download the Cloysters Ignation Prayer app, which is really well done, by the way. They let us have a free trial of it, and it is great. So that's Cloysters Ignation Prayer or dot org. So you want to go there. Thank you to the Cloysters on the Plat. Subscriptions benefit that a nonprofit ignation retreat, like we said, in Omaha.

CloystersIgnation Prayer dot org. Thank you for sponsoring this portion of catching foxes.

speaker-0 (01:12:31.862)
It's so funny how people don't change. They want an apology. That's like ex that's like some like my honor, sir. I want an apology from my you know, like from the eighteenth century. Basically got Hamilton killed.

speaker-1 (01:12:40.469)
Yeah.

My dad my dad, I love the story that he told. He said one day he he was at Texaco and in in Tulsa and you know it's a big one of the bigger buildings in Tulsa, and he says he walks over and he goes, Hey, you wanna see something you wanna see something crazy? And he was talking with a couple guys that are like the water cooler and they're like, okay. It's like my dad who says that like, Hey, you wanna see something crazy? So he walks up and he opens the door to the whole floor's boss. He opens the door and he's like

Who the hell do you think you are? And all the people were like, my gosh. And he starts like yelling at the guy and cussing out the guy from the doorway with the door wide open. The whole place stops, turns, and looks, and he turns and he looks at the guys and they're like freaking like, what the hell are you doing? He goes, He went on vacation. The office was empty. He just thought it would be funny to do that. And I was like, that's

speaker-0 (01:13:35.194)
That's awesome. So random. That's awesome.

speaker-1 (01:13:37.442)
That's so random. when he died at the the hospice house that he was at, the people that worked there, I mean, they were there there was a man that saw my dad every day, one of the nurses. He was so great. And I mean both of them were so great. And she was just like beside herself, weeping and weeping. And she's like, We loved your dad. We loved your dad. He was only there for like a month, month and a half. We loved your dad. He was so good, he was so great, like we loved him. She said, even the day he died, he was he was trying to be funny.

Like, your dad was the funniest guy we've ever had here. Like, he was just such a delight. And I like, Yeah, he was. Yeah, he was. Yeah. Love that. Love that.

speaker-0 (01:14:16.314)
dude, I love you, buddy. It's not an easy thing. It's a club I wish I didn't have to welcome I didn't have to like welcome you into, but welcome to the Dead Dads Club. We've got jokes.

speaker-1 (01:14:28.162)
Dead dad's club. Yeah. I will say this. So so the the thing that started the whole conversation around the blood pressure medicine. so I went off it because I'm I'm I'm getting peripheral edema where your legs swell from fluid buildup in your extremities. So the one that I'm taking, that's like its most it two most common side effects are flushing where you feel like really warm all over and swelling in your flashes. Yeah, yeah.

speaker-0 (01:14:35.214)
Yeah, how you doing?

speaker-1 (01:14:56.514)
I'm going through perimetopause like my wife. probably should have said that publicly, but there it is. It's a HIPAA agreement. why are there so many portable battery powered fans? no, and so she so she. so I'm like going through this stuff. I'm watching that YouTube video, guys. Like the most important thing you can do to improve your health is sleep. I don't care if you diet, exercise, all this stuff. None of that matters if you're not getting sleep and enough sleep and good sleep.

Sleep is the origin point of all things. And I'm like, Cool, cool. So why am I not getting sleep? So I start following all these like people on like sleep apnea and good sleep and sleep you know, all this stuff. And I go down this rabbit hole. So here's the YouTube religion rabbit hole, right? It's like it's not about sleep. That's not the most important thing, 'cause the one thing that's ruining my sleep is breathing. I'm not breathing well.

And so I I have a cross bite and my parents were too poor to afford all the stuff and I did not like our I felt like my dentist was somewhat of a sadist and so I should have gotten a palate expander. So I have like a V shaped palate instead of a U shaped palate where your tongue rests on the roof of your mouth, and the roof of your mouth is the floor of your nose. So my nasal passages are constricted, often lead to stuffy nose, all this stuff. But it is very easy to it's troubling and difficult to breathe.

Through the nose. I had no idea. I had no idea how important nasal breathing was and how awful mouth breathing is. I had no clue. I had no clue. Like literally what

speaker-0 (01:16:34.38)
In college w when I would be in a car and the side of the window would get v really foggy. Yeah. It's because I was breathing through my mouth. Yeah. I found out Yeah. Yeah.

speaker-1 (01:16:42.766)
So they took they took silicone, shoved it up the nose they shoved it up the nose of monkeys to block their nasal passages, and within six months their teeth became crooked. They began Solen, puff cheese. All this then they pulled it out, and like within a year, it was fine again. Why is it that Native Americans have the straightest best teeth? There was a guy of fa actually he was a I think he was a Philadelphia portrait artist.

And he's like, I hate my life, I hate rich people, and he got a bunch of tools. His name, I think his name was Carlin. Carlin, Carlin. And he just went out into the savage land, right? And he would do all these sketches and he of the mid the Midwest Great Plains Indians that very few white people had had contact with. He ended up logging like f three or four times more miles than Lewis and Clark. And so this guy went everywhere, and he because he was an artist, he took detailed illustrations.

And because there's just one guy wasn't, you know, with an army, you know, the Indians didn't find him threatening in different places. And he found Indians that like no longer exist, like light skinned, blonde haired, sick the average he said the average man was over six feet tall, the average woman was about six feet tall. In this Great Plains tribe, like all these different like what were they called? The the the manna, the manny? I don't know, I can't remember. But he and he was like friends with all of these Indian tribes.

And he said the no matter where he was, the most common thing that they would do is all the mothers would pinch their baby's mouths closed so they would breathe through their nose. Right? From from birth on. Right. And they would breastfeed for like four years. So sucking at the breast would cause like your jaws to form and have that, you know, that kind of distinct Native American, like strong jaw.

And the pinching of the of the mouth would force babies to breathe through their nose. And you know, so they developed a whole mythology around it like like if you ha like breath through your mouth was considered poison, right? So it's like this fascinating so this guy's like, This is crazy. They have perfectly straight teeth, they're all huge, they're all strong, none of them are ever sick. He goes, I go back to my native Philadelphia to tell this story. Everyone has crooked teeth.

speaker-1 (01:18:59.33)
Dentists are pulling out teeth because our mouths are so crowded. And it's like this whole chain of things, right? So it's naval breathing, it's it's sucking and chewing hard things that are difficult to chew, like meat when you're babies. And it's like, but when you go, when you grow up in an industrialized society, that's kind of like the argument of this book I'm reading, foods are very soft. They're very soft to chew. Even foods that were notoriously not easy to chew, like bread, once the manufacturing mass production, it's just the white gummy stuff that's easy to chew.

So it's like our jaws get more crowded, our nasal passages then get more constricted, blah, blah, blah. So he's describing all this stuff, and I'm like, this guy's describing me like to a T and it's so hard for me to breathe. And then they talk about like all these like over and over again in the dental or orthodontic world, a guy will emerge who's like, no, this is actually about breathing. That's why we have crooked teeth. It's about breathing and chewing. And then they will be like chased out of the profession by all the other dentists.

Like this has happened in like the eighteen eighties. It was like eight eighteen sixty five, eighteen eighties, the twenties, the sixties, and the most famous is have you ever heard of mewing? Yes. Like the looks maxing people who mew?

speaker-0 (01:20:09.092)
speaker-1 (01:20:14.062)
it's like you can move your bones by doing different like muscle and breathing techniques. And it was this doctor's last name is E W and him and his son

speaker-0 (01:20:23.796)
Yes, I okay. Yeah, that's I I I have heard of that before.

speaker-1 (01:20:26.882)
Yeah, but it's all about like palate expanders and stuff like that. He's a thing called they invented called like the monoblock and his sun perfected and the bio block and all these different things. But it's all about like opening the nasal passages, doing things. Like you can train your lungs to to d like doc a lot of medical professionals believe like your organs are your organs no matter what. Like once you hit thirty, they're not changing. It's like, no, you can actually you can you can like triple your lung capacity a as a sixty year old person.

Like one lady healed scoliosis. She scoliosis, that's the S of your spine, right?

speaker-0 (01:20:58.966)
This is the mo really quick, this is the most podcast. Keep on going.

speaker-1 (01:21:01.102)
Conversation. I know. So this girl, she had severely crippling scoliosis where she was like bent completely over to one side, and she's she's like, no one would help her, no one could fix it. So she started doing these like she's like, Well, what's pushing up against my spine that I can fix? My lungs? So she started doing these crazy breathing exercises, and she fixed her spine. So then she went to a doctor who knew her story, and she's like, This is how I did it with breathing. And he's like, If you tell people this.

I will get you brought up on charges for malpractice. You're a charlatan. You're a scammer. You faked it. And she's You have my x-rays. This woman's in Germany. So she goes and she builds like this little house in the woods. And all these people with severe scoliosis who couldn't even walk straight. Like, all this stuff would come to her and she would teach them these breathing exercises. They would fix her scoliosis. And she was like, she was attacked. She was physically assaulted for daring to say these things by scientists and doctors.

And now she is was awarded like the highest medal for civilian scientists in Germany for like her groundbreaking stuff. So it's like all this stuff keeps happening. And I'm like, dude, I breathe so terribly. And it's just fascinating. Like the guy in the book like, you know, he talks about a lot about Buddhist monks and about you know, like Hindu stuff 'cause they do breath work. And he's like, But did you know like the Catholic Latin rosary is the perfect breath?

So if someone's leading it and you're doing the response, it's five point five seconds in Latin to say the Ave, and then it's the response which is your exhale is five point five seconds in Latin, and that's the perfect breathing tempo through your nose. And I was like, dude, Benedict Father Benedict Rochelle said that. He said when he was a priest, they would pray the rosary and they would do it in two breaths. And I was like, breath, that's like hippy dippy shit, you know? And now I'm like, well

Breathing really is the foundation of health. And if breathing is the foundation of health, then that leads to good sleeping. Then that leads to good hormonal control, muscle, weight loss, cortisol levels. So that's my track. It's like, what's the foundation of the foundation? It's breathing. So I've been focusing on that. I put breathe right strips on my nose so my nasal passages open. I frickin' snort saline solution through my nostrils and clear them out. I have my head yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I angle my head

speaker-1 (01:23:20.768)
in such a way, like sleep on your left side is the best side to sleep on. You can sleep on your right. Don't sleep on your back. if you need to be a little bit elevated, you know, whatever. But make sure your neck is supported so that you don't pin you don't go too high or too low because it'll close up and I'm fat, right? I'm a really fat guy. I'm really obese. So my Yes I am. I am I am the second highest level of obesity.

speaker-0 (01:23:45.878)
I know, but like there there's like y you're not like my gosh, you know, he can't get on a roller coaster obey Like let's you know. God willing. God willing.

speaker-1 (01:23:51.15)
I'm almost there. I'm almost God willing. Well, how about this? The Homer Simpson episode where he gets gains weight in order to go on disability so he can work from home. Yeah. I weigh more than him.

Look at that motorfly. Woohoo. You remember that scene where he takes his belly off the towel rack and then all of a sudden it shoots up? I'm like, Yeah. Holy shit, I weigh like more than that. God. anywho, so long story short, what happens is like along with visceral fat, fat will build up in your airways and around your tongue, and it'll clog your airway. So it's like all of these things, if you sleep on your side, you have a better chance, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I noticed by taking this seriously, my mouth would be like dry as hell.

speaker-0 (01:24:10.399)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (01:24:38.2)
You have dry mouth when you wake up, you're snoring. Right. So I did all this stuff. Now it's like I would say it's like fifty percent better, fifty percent more restful sleep, you know, and just doing over the counter stuff. Saline solution, not anything not steroids, not afferin, right? I just use, you know, whatever I don't know, saline solution. And cocaine. That's great.

speaker-0 (01:25:03.822)
Okay.

Well done.

speaker-1 (01:25:08.588)
And I sleep for two days. Do this. Anywho, so that's been a huge part. And breathing, this is the last thing I'm gonna say. I'll I'll I'll I'll stop talking. But one thing that no, one thing that controls this is a seven part series. scientists found out that this one gas your body makes called nitric oxide helps in lowering your blood pressure. You can get this is the funniest thing. You can get you can increase your nitric oxide by six times.

By doing na just nasal breathing for five minutes or more. So you increase that and it can lower your blood pressure by like ten points. Now it's kind of in the moment thing, but if it comes to your regular practice, it it all balances. Okay. So this is the funny thing. But the Hindus and the yogis have discovered another technique called

speaker-0 (01:25:56.854)
This is such Manosphere Podcasting stuff right now.

speaker-1 (01:25:59.918)
Manosphere This is all the ladies do it, men do it.

speaker-0 (01:26:03.214)
Whatever, so I mean you know what I mean. Just just like a bunch of stuff that's absolutely true.

speaker-1 (01:26:06.509)
Here

Yeah. Yeah. So it's called bee breathing. Buzz buzz breathing. Buzz breathing. Where you hum

speaker-0 (01:26:12.331)
bee breathing of

speaker-0 (01:26:16.674)
Buzz, your girlfriend. Woof.

speaker-1 (01:26:18.622)
Yeah.

You you hum while doing the nasal breathing. Okay? So Luke, we're gonna do it real quick together. You ready for this? Okay. Gosh. Okay. You're gonna take your hands and you're gonna put over the you're gonna put your index finger over your eyebrow.

speaker-0 (01:26:38.03)
All right, I don't have I don't have a boom arm so I

speaker-1 (01:26:40.394)
Okay, just just do it with Then you're gonna close your eyes, you're gonna put your middle finger over your closed eyes. Okay? You can watch me do it first. Then you're going to take your ring finger and you're gonna put it at the crotch of your nostrils and kind of just slightly pull back. Then you're gonna take your thumbs, and you can't really do this because you have your headphones on, but you're gonna put it on your tragus, which is that little nubbin of flesh

in front of your ear hole and you're gonna close your ear hole. So you're blocking out sound and sight. And then you're gonna breathe for you're taking a four second breath through your nose, and then you're gonna hum. Make sure your mouth is closed, but your teeth are apart, slightly apart, because you don't want to have like all this the vibration stimulates your vagus nerve and it does this up. So you go, you go like this, you go

speaker-0 (01:27:31.126)
No this You're Vegas what

speaker-1 (01:27:38.702)
Mm-hmm.

You look like a psychopath. It's so funny. But they found out if you combine nasal breathing with the hum, it increases the nitric oxide fifteen times. No, no, no. This is all this is all medically backed stuff. Six fifteen times fifteen times more nitric oxide or during the breathing. And you can drop your blood pressure. So if you're having a an angina reaction where your chest angina

speaker-0 (01:27:51.864)
Point two eight.

speaker-0 (01:28:07.423)
Wait a while.

Wait, one more time for the people in the back?

speaker-1 (01:28:12.014)
Angina. in in i if you live in Canada at Regina, you c if you're having like chest pains, w because if you have high blood pressure, right? Not for other reasons, right? But that can help like lower your blood pressure like pretty dramatically just because it creates nitric oxide. Fifteen times more.

speaker-0 (01:28:14.104)
Mm-hmm. Sorry.

speaker-1 (01:28:33.046)
Now do I do it? No. I hum, I'll do the hum I'll do the hum and breathing, but I I don't blot out all my senses. I think that's weird.

speaker-0 (01:28:40.942)
Sorry kids, Daddy's gotta do his Hindu breathing really quick.

speaker-1 (01:28:44.078)
Sorry, sorry, dad. Your dad's gotta become a little bumblebee. I gotta become a little bumblebee for a few minutes. Breathing. Yeah. But I'll tell you what, man, you want to be calm. You want to be collected. You want to yeah, your whole like everything like that. So this guy trains Olympic athletes to breathe like sprinters to breathe through their nose and to

speaker-0 (01:28:53.079)
It helps me with

speaker-0 (01:29:09.944)
Really is your new obsession.

speaker-1 (01:29:11.628)
Well, I'm reading a book. I'm just reading the book, so I'm regurgitating the book. The book is a New York Times bestseller. Like this author is not but the author is phenomenal. And he goes through all these like medical tests and stuff like that and these clinics and they scrape his nasal passages and they shove cameras and do all this stuff at Stanford and at Harvard and at you know out in the UK for the Mewing guy and all this stuff. It's it's a fascinating book. But there's a dude on YouTube, Patrick McEwen, who's considered to be one of the best experts on

the scientific side of breathing and he started a s a center named after a Soviet scientist who was like about to die and he did all these breathing techniques and changed his life, blah blah blah blah blah. But I just want to say if you want better sleep and you want less stress, starts with breathing. Really does. Because sleep is the origin point of muscle building, right? Muscle what do you call it? Hy hyphy?

Where your your body builds muscle. All of that stuff, it does it while you sleep. So if you don't sleep well and right, yeah. Hypertrophy. Thank you. you have Stephanie in the chat. Literal best riverside moment ever. And she put the monkey icon, you know, the see no evil monkey. my gosh, that's funny. Hypertrophy. Thank you. anywho.

So like all these things that that sleep sleep is a mechanism of your body. It's not like, I'm not doing anything. Yeah. And so by doing that, all of a sudden all these things change. And so I'm like, I I'm on a quest for better sleep. So I'm gonna do a this at home sleep study from a a scientific company called Lofta, where you have a wrist monitor and a finger monitor and you sleep all night and has a audio device that records your movement and your snoring and tracks it and tries to figure out what your sleep patterns are like.

speaker-0 (01:31:03.64)
How much did that cost?

speaker-1 (01:31:05.1)
I haven't I haven't ordered it yet. It's about $120. It's a disposable at home sleep test. And I'm like, gosh, can I just keep it and keep doing it over and over again? I'll take Yeah, yeah. So it's stuff like that that like I need to get better. And yeah, you know, to close this out, I took an quasi legal gray market Chinese produced GLP one peptide.

speaker-0 (01:31:13.678)
Ten please.

speaker-1 (01:31:39.666)
Let it

speaker-0 (01:31:41.878)
That's awesome.

speaker-1 (01:31:45.976)
Yeah, you know what, j Gwen just wrote Q The Catholic Pearl Clutching, Don't invite demons with your Hindu breathing techniques. Dude, I scrutinize all these to make sure they're they're not like based on like gods and all their like mista Anywho.

speaker-0 (01:31:55.854)
You are such a podcaster. No no no, I scrutinized it. I scrutinized it fifteen times fifteen times.

speaker-1 (01:32:02.102)
Dave terrified me with all this stuff. He's These are poses for gods. And I'm Yeah, but some of the poses are like imitating cats and cows. Can I do that? And he's like, Yeah. I'm like, Okay. Can I be a little cat? So I'm taking Redatrutide in a gray market, Reditrutide getting shot into my stomach fat. My brother's like, You gotta do it, dude. You gotta do it, dude

speaker-0 (01:32:11.732)
speaker-1 (01:32:25.312)
So he has his supplier. Supplier. My brother used to be addicted to drugs and all this stuff. And thank God he's cleaning and stuff. But so he's sitting there, we're helping my mom with my finances. He goes, We need to take a break now so I can give you your shot. And so he's showing me how to mix the stuff and this is a very gentle very sensitive peptide, so you need to roll the bacterium, whatever it's called, and here you gotta shoot you gotta put it in the needle at a forty five degree angle, pinch your body fat, and so I pinch my fat and went

And I was like, I didn't really even feel that. He's like, Yeah, it's awesome. And then

speaker-0 (01:33:00.046)
So and it's been working? Like have you are you doing it every day?

speaker-1 (01:33:03.286)
No, no, you only do it once a week. You only do it once a week. Okay. So I'm s so the like Eli Lilly is the one inventing it. And their their clinical trials are still going on, probably go on for till twenty twenty seven. People are saying that the GLP one revolution is more important than AI in scale of what it's gonna do for humanity. And this is for people like this is the way I I think about it and I frame it. the the what was I gonna say? The Eli Lilly starts you at

four milliliters, I'm doing one because I, you know, I'm and I'm gonna gradually increase but the Eli Lilly goes all the way up to like forty two milliliters of a weekly application and I'm never gonna do that. That's because they're trying to get a third function of the medicine so that it can be protected from genetics or generics for an extra like twenty years instead of five. So when you invent a medicine it has to have these markers and

The Ozempic has like ten markers, health markers that it improves. And that's and so that means you can have generics in five years. But if you have forty two or more markers, it's like twenty years. So Eli Lilly is like, well, we keep giving people more of this stuff and they're having like crazy healing effects in different parts of their bodies. So now we have to so they're commissioning the so the studies are going longer and longer, which doesn't mean the gray market stuff, which is cheap as hell

It's still available. It doesn't cost a thousand dollars. yeah, so it's pretty sweet.

speaker-0 (01:34:35.71)
Tell me more about the gray market stuff over text. I thought about doing it. I I I I went to my doctor and I asked him but it was five hundred dollars a month and I was like, ho ho, no. Yeah no sir. No sir.

speaker-1 (01:34:38.904)
Well,

speaker-1 (01:34:48.29)
Yeah. So right now you can get red of true tide if you go to a compounding pharmacy or you just order it from some American supplier that is the people who manufacture for Eli Lilly and other people, right? So you gotta make sure you're not getting some fake shit and you're injecting fake shit. So my brother like my br before he ever took it, he spent months and months like sending stuff to labs and, you know, getting it verified and all this stuff. So I was like, okay, you trust them, let's go.

speaker-0 (01:35:17.096)
What a weird world we live in.

speaker-1 (01:35:21.07)
My brother goes, How's it going? Do you have any side effects? And I said, no, not yet. I think maybe I had a headache, but it's probably more related to my neck muscle and stuff. And then I said, But I did kind of just do a twenty four hour fast and I haven't been able to and it was easy. Like I j I had a big lunch, I had a big breakfast, big lunch, and then I didn't eat until lunch the next day and I like, no see and that food noise went away. So that's that's what it's faint the GLP once, is what everyone says. Like your food noise goes away. So

speaker-0 (01:35:50.464)
Nice. Cool. I like it. I had a thing that I wanted to do, but I'm really, really hungry.

speaker-1 (01:35:56.311)
What do you want to do?

speaker-0 (01:35:57.875)
I wanted to talk about spoilers and the Avengers Doomsday.

Listen, w if you wanna keep going, I'm willing to keep going, I just need to go and g grab a water. You wanna do wanna do

speaker-1 (01:36:11.724)
No, let's end it and let's let's meet again. Let's let's schedule a thing. Let's schedule it right now on our phones.

speaker-0 (01:36:21.058)
This is one of the reasons why I like doing I I know I wish I could do it more during the day, but I like doing it i in the morning because it's not keeping me up at night so I can get my sleep. I know. But an an do you wanna try to keep doing it every two weeks? Or do you wanna try to s go for every week?

speaker-1 (01:36:31.234)
And my Wookiee.

speaker-1 (01:36:41.218)
Let's do a f like I think we could do this fun one. What about VFW dance? what about the twenty third, Thursday? What if we did an evening show? You you don't have every do you?

speaker-0 (01:36:55.724)
Nope. Nope.

speaker-1 (01:36:58.126)
All right.

speaker-0 (01:37:00.738)
Nope. Nope. I'm wide open. So

speaker-1 (01:37:03.071)
We'll set that for six seven p.m. on Thursday so we don't we're not Yeah. No, my time. Yeah. So eight PM your time.

speaker-0 (01:37:08.077)
My time?

Okay, so eight eight of my time? Yeah, yeah, let's do it.

speaker-1 (01:37:14.732)
Okay. And just want to give a shout out to Rebecca. Rebecca. Our Discord genius fan of the show. She got married a couple gosh, what is it now? Has been two weeks? Yeah. She got married. I have her wedding of a day or wedding announcement downstairs on my refrigerator. but everyone should know Rebecca. She has been so involved in everything.

speaker-0 (01:37:40.814)
Particularly with the Discord, yeah.

speaker-1 (01:37:42.71)
Yeah, she is the supermaster. I I think she can boot me and you off if she so desired with her will. No. and she but truly meeting Russ, so to do. Meet and just so to do. anyw, she she's awesome. She got married and we love it. I don't think what are we catching fox hashtag catching foxes made me do it. I don't think that ever worked. But she found love in all the right places.

speaker-0 (01:37:49.61)
It would be right and just.

speaker-0 (01:38:05.838)
There were some people who got it. I I know a couple that got married because of that. I mean that's that like was part of their initial conversation. Yes, this was back in twenty twenty, twenty nineteen.

speaker-1 (01:38:13.74)
Really?

speaker-1 (01:38:17.068)
Gi th I think that story was they had it on there but they didn't meet through that, but they both did that. Or something I can't remember.

speaker-0 (01:38:25.656)
I mean well, I mean, w what do you mean by they met through that?

speaker-1 (01:38:29.42)
I think they met on an online dating platform but it was after they'd already taken that hashtag off.

speaker-0 (01:38:35.286)
No, I I think that Emily 'cause this is Emily and Alex. I think that they did Emily Conklin and Alex forget his last name.

speaker-1 (01:38:40.974)
I forgot. Okay. Gosh. Why didn't we go to their wedding?

speaker-0 (01:38:47.862)
I did. They were 'cause they're based in Cincinnati.

speaker-1 (01:38:51.376)
that's right. Okay. It's all coming back to me. Yeah. Stephanie in the chat said Rebecca is our biggest hype gal.

speaker-0 (01:38:53.282)
Good friends of mine when I was down there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

speaker-0 (01:38:58.72)
No, truly, truly.

speaker-1 (01:39:00.694)
She's she's perfect. And everything she does is perfect.

speaker-0 (01:39:03.958)
It's great. Yeah. Seriously. It's so we would not it would be

speaker-1 (01:39:07.808)
So as as Luke and I's household AMG G sings at every wedding reception, music and wine pleases but not like conjugal. Here, here. God bless you all.

speaker-0 (01:39:16.076)
Mm so

speaker-0 (01:39:23.288)
thank you to our sponsors, Joe Add the Man. Bye people that we were supposed to do it for, but then I like, sorry, we'll we'll try to do it. it's the person with the therapy in Texas.

speaker-1 (01:39:25.518)
What's who's a sponsor?

speaker-1 (01:39:34.422)
faith?

speaker-0 (01:39:35.822)
I think so. That app and then Parisoft or whatever.

Sorry that we've been a little MIA everyone.

speaker-1 (01:39:45.388)
No, what what is what what so here's the funny thing. gosh, faith, what is it?

speaker-0 (01:39:52.61)
Yeah, I think it's FaithMosure. Yeah. Yes, Faith

speaker-1 (01:39:56.866)
Dallas Healing House. She's her Dallas Healing House. So here's just my my my my thing for her. I am trying to get my mom to talk to her. Good. My my mom is struggling with a lot of grief stuff and I said, Mom, you should just call this like you should just do it. Just do it. She can do all sorts of stuff. She w she have grief and losses on her website. She's a devout Roman Catholic. She gets all that side of things.

speaker-0 (01:40:10.299)
good.

speaker-1 (01:40:26.094)
She's not gonna make you do anything you don't wanna do besides large amounts of cocaine. Other than that, just kidding. But you know, she has all of this. So, like, you should do it. You would like it. You would like it. And yeah. Yeah, so I'm I'm hoping and praying that my mom calls Faith and Faith Mosier and does that. So anyhow, that's my plug. My plug for her. Nice.

speaker-0 (01:40:48.62)
Nice. All right everyone, we'll be back next week. So look at this. Th th Gomer was great to t talk to you. Everyone those in the chat. Thank you very much. really quick, if you are still listening, if you can give us a review and comment on Spotify, review on Apple or Spotify, that really does help. We're trying to we definitely are you know, we're back. We do we have a plan? No, but you know, we're back. So we're back.

speaker-1 (01:41:11.33)
We're back and we're gonna have some traditional Marvel content for you all. Actually

speaker-0 (01:41:14.826)
Yes, yeah, yeah, w no 'cause I got some thoughts. All right guys. I am

speaker-1 (01:41:18.83)
I'm Gomer. I'm Luke. I'm Gomer and this has been Catching Fox. Alright, adios pro.

speaker-0 (01:41:21.206)
We don't have a sign off.

speaker-0 (01:41:27.426)
Two foxes.

speaker-0 (01:41:31.468)
Bye buddy. Love you. Wait, no, don't leave. Stop.