The Hangout with David Sciarretta
Conversations with interesting people.
The Hangout with David Sciarretta
#106: From Adventure Writer to Soul Seeker: Brad Wetzler on Writing and Living
In this episode, Brad Wetzler shares the fascinating journey of his life, one that has taken him all over the world. Brad is an author and writing coach whose work is deeply informed by his unique and broad life experiences. Listen to hear more about Brad's story --- the struggles, successes, and profound lessons that have guided him to where he is today.
For more information on Brad’s writing projects and coaching services, visit bradwetzler.com.
Purchase Brad’s most recent book Into the Soul of the World: https://a.co/d/2KIi0HA
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Welcome to the Hangout Podcast. I'm your host, david Shoretta. Come on in and hang out. In this episode, I was privileged to have a conversation with Brad Wetzler. Brad is a journalist, author, adventurer, writing, coach, seeker and someone who spent his life asking big questions about meaning, resilience, the human journey, recovery. From his days as a correspondent when he was traveling the world to his deeply personal explorations of healing and self-discovery, brad brings a wisdom that's both hard-earned and also deeply relatable. In this episode, we dive into the stories that remind us of how courage and curiosity can really reshape our lives. I had a wonderful time in this wide-ranging conversation with Brad and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did in this wide ranging conversation with Brad, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. This episode contains discussion of sensitive topics, including suicide, drug use and other adult content. Listener discretion is advised. If you or someone you know is struggling, please seek professional help or call your local crisis hotline. Welcome, Brad. I really appreciate you coming on the podcast for a conversation this afternoon.
Speaker 2:It's a pleasure, david, it's good to see you.
Speaker 2:Likewise, I'd like for us to start where I start with all these conversations, which is with your origin story, where you come from, what your journey was like to this present moment, and then we'll branch off from that.
Speaker 2:Sure, I'm going to start my origin story in the middle and then I'm going to back up. So I grew up in Kansas, in the suburbs of Kansas City, and you know I was an earnest kid that came into Christianity through Fellowship of Christian Athletes and really got obsessed with that as a young man and ultimately then went off to college and, you know, fell in love with writers and kind of left that past behind and then ultimately became an adventure writer through working at Outside Magazine and I went to graduate school at Northwestern after finishing up at the University of Kansas and the day after I started there, or the day after I graduated, I landed a job as an intern and worked my way up the masthead and became a senior editor. And then, long story short, they didn't have staff writers and so I went out on my own to be a hung a shingle and became a freelance magazine writer, writing for all various magazines. So there's a little bit of it. Feel free to probe more so.
Speaker 1:So there's a little bit of it. Feel free to probe more. Yeah, so Kansas City, huh, yeah, still the smack dab in the midst of barbecue and baseball and you know the center of the country roughly right.
Speaker 2:Yes, it's the heartland, and absolutely. I was a big Royals fan and barbecue fan and there was a radio station that talked about the three B's baseball, barbecue and blues and they had some good blues clubs there, and I remember as a young man playing guitar and watching a lot of music there too, so it was a good place to grow up. You know Midwestern values and you know played sports, played you know baseball when I was young, and then basketball and tennis through high school, and you know it's pretty flat out there in Kansas, though.
Speaker 1:On the face of it you had this kind of a typical Midwestern Americana upbringing and life. But as you mentioned in your memoir, there was kind of some undercurrents there. And I bring up the term undercurrent pretty intentionally because I want to return to this theme of water. It presents itself multiple times in your life but the first time it's very prominent in your memoir. Can you talk to us about when it appears and this canoe trip and kind of what that kind of is the undercurrents to this kind of typical American lifestyle? I believe your dad was an attorney and successful and kind of a homemaker mom and just this leave it to beaver type of household on one hand, but then this other undercurrent.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, good question. So everything at you know at home appeared to be, you know, like you said, not just normal but kind of extraordinary. We were sort of taught to view ourselves that way. You know, we were smart, good at sports. You know we were smart, good at sports, belonged to a tennis club and everything you know on the surface looked like it was awesome and.
Speaker 2:But there was a lot going on at home and you know, my dad was drinking a lot and and I was. You know, I was struggling with that. It just felt like I was living a lie, and the more I spoke up about it, the more I seemed to get pushed out of the family system. And and well, when I was 12, just to get to the undercurrent, so there was an undercurrent going on at home and then when I was 12, we went on a father son canoe trip, actually through the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which is the organization that I belong to, and it was father-son, and so we went down to northern Arkansas, which I think was about a, you know, seven or eight hour drive from Kansas City, and we got down there and it had been raining a lot. The river was very high. You know, the, the guy that owned the campground, offered to give us some money back. He said it was too high, that a few people almost died the weekend before.
Speaker 2:And but you know, our group decided to run, run the river and you know, on the first day my dad and I had had some trouble Neither of us were good canoeists and we were going backwards and sideways, you know the entire time. And after lunch we put the canoe back in and got going sideways again and the canoe tipped over and I remember vividly the water rushing over the side of the canoe and swamping us and I bailed out and I remember floating downstream and at one point then I just felt this really fast jerk and this powerful jerk backwards that looked up and I was stranded in the middle of the river and the river was very strong and it was pushing me into this log and trying to pull me away but also pushing me in, and I realized that my life jacket is snagged on a submerged log in the river and you know I kept getting pulled down and kind of released again. And I looked over and I saw my dad crawling out onto the river and you know I kept getting pulled down and kind of released again and I looked over and I saw my dad crawling out onto the riverbank and he looked scared but he also looked paralyzed and I thought he would do something to come get me and I, but nothing, he didn't and there was no options and I thought I was going to die there. You know, it was a very tenuous situation and I was there for I don't know how long, I think it had to be between five and 10 minutes. And then, thank God, there was another canoe coming and I remember kind of looking up and here, you know, seeing a hand reaching for me and it missed me. But then the canoe struck me, or the log, and it was just a big collision. The next thing I knew I was floating downstream and it ended up getting pulled out of the river and put in the bottom of another boat. And then my dad eventually came over and got me. So it was a traumatic experience.
Speaker 2:I remember that night, you know, there was a, we had a campfire and I remember the leader of the group, you know, saying a prayer, thanking God that I was OK, and you know it was a very real experience. But then the next day we drove home and I remember running up to tell my mom about it and my dad stepped in front of me and basically said that what I was saying didn't happen, that I was exaggerating, and nothing like that happened. My shirt got snagged on a twig and I was utterly confused and at that point I was still young and so I didn't say anything. I had cuts up and down the side of my body and bruises and was really sore. I remember at school just feeling so sore up and down my entire torso and anyway, that's the story of the other undercurrent that was going on.
Speaker 1:I wonder when I read that in the book and I know you've shared it a lot you wrote about it, so this is out in the public, but I'm sure it's never easy to recount that why do you think your dad so downplayed it? Was it this I'm going to have a macho son thing? Because it didn't sound like from your description of the family dynamic he was particularly concerned about your mom judging him harshly for not keeping an eye on you, right it?
Speaker 2:was more a commentary on you or your lack of ability or something. Yeah, I feel like there was some of that, that I wasn't being brave or something. But I also learned over through time that taking accountability for things was not something he did and came up over and over again and the story well into adulthood became, you know, up to this day even is that my shirt got snagged on a twig and you know, he and I are speaking now after a long time of not, and I've never brought that up again. I used to bring it up all the time, you know, just trying to understand why my reality was so different from his. You know, especially younger, I knew my experience. I'd never doubted my experience and at the same time, you know, you kind of get obsessed with trying to make it match up.
Speaker 2:And 10 years after this happened, I was back in Kansas City and I was at a Kansas City Royals baseball game and I ran into our group leader there and I'd been kind of mulling over this over for the previous 10 years, why my reality didn't match up with my dad's. And first thing out of his mouth is God, I'm so glad you're alive. You know, I just sort of it's boom, all this kind of confirmation arrived. But again, you know, my body knows what's true and I never really doubted it. It was just this weird obsession and confusion about this reality didn't match up with the. The man who I looked up to, you know that's, that was the. The other part, it wasn't just, it was my dad's reality and that's like that's supreme right when you're a kid. So and in some ways your own.
Speaker 1:So yeah, in some ways it remains supreme at some level throughout our whole lives, right?
Speaker 2:Right, exactly. Yeah, it takes a lot of work to start to let go of that.
Speaker 1:So you go, you have this despite that, or you know that traumatic situation, you go on. You're successful in high school, college, you become a writer, rise to the position of editor. And full disclosure. I have family in Santa Fe and the Outside Magazine headquarters is right next to the REI store.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Right by the train tracks, and I would always. I used to be a huge fan of Outside Magazine in an earlier iteration of their life, when it was less about product and more about story. So I would always see this beautiful Santa Fe two-story, beautiful building and go oh, what a dream it must be to work there in some capacity. So you work there and, on the face of it again, you have this perfect lifestyle for an adventure-seeking young person. Talk to us about the dichotomy the light and the dark right of your existence, and how that led into the rest of your life.
Speaker 2:That's funny how you've asked these questions and it really has me thinking in an interesting new way of just how I arrived at this magazine. And you know, it was my first corporate experience. But everything was not just good, but it was extraordinary there too, right, and there was a lot of masculine macho-ness around the office. So there was this appearance that everything was great in my life. I was killing it. You know, the first few years of my work I mean after I left the magazine to be a writer, I was writing for the New York Times, I was a contributing editor at George, which was JFK's magazine, I was writing for GQ and Wire and all these places and living the dream, you know, and traveling Many months of the year.
Speaker 2:I was married and we had a couple of dogs and had a great house outside of Santa Fe, and yet it seemed like with each passing year I was falling further and further into depressions which had struck me when I was younger, but they became deeper and with all the travel and the time zone changes I was coming back and falling into depressions that were lasting months and sometimes just never seeming really to leave, and it was having a lot of what I now understand to be kind of emotional flashbacks, and flashbacks both to the canoeing accident, but just these intense emotional surges that were running through me that I didn't understand. And eventually, you know I was I was seeing a psychiatrist that's a whole other story my involvement with psychiatry but I'd gotten misdiagnosed at a young age and was taking a lot of medications and and I was working with a psychiatrist in Santa Fe that just every time I went in he added, seemed to add something else. So you know, maybe I guess I asked for it too. I was seeking answers and seeking solutions. You know I wanted to keep on this pace of being. You know I want to be a great writer. I want to be a great adventure writer, like the people that I admired when I was an editor.
Speaker 2:And and yet the wheels were falling off and and I was finding myself in remote places, having these terrible abandonment flashbacks. And eventually I went into the psychiatrist's office and you know he said your options are, you know, electroconvulsive therapy, shock therapy, or or an antipsychotic. And I just I wasn't psychotic, this was just for depressions really and he put me on a psychotic. It was an easy choice. I was afraid of electroshock and probably for good reason. I'd seen one flew with a cuckoo's nest too many times and long story short, I basically went to bed for several years, you know, and kind of crawled out occasionally when an assignment came my way and didn't do a very good job at it, made mistakes and went back and hardly left again.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, that went on for years. I mean, you were an integral part, for example, of John Krakauer's work around Into Thin Air, which you might not be on the front end of the public facing part of that, but behind the scenes, like I'm a huge John Krakauer fan and and that was the first book of his I read and I was transfixed by this story and I'd never thought that there's an editor sitting back, you know, pulling all-nighters going oh my God, are we going to hear from John on the mountain and all that. So you've got that, you've got your writing success and you're married and this young, energetic lifestyle and all the trappings of, as you say, kind of the macho lifestyle, the outdoorsy, outside, magazine kind of ethos, yeah, and do you think that that was all? I mean, adventure can be beautiful, but it also can just be an escape, right? I mean, was that really your drug of choice before you actually had drugs of choice?
Speaker 2:I think you're on to something there. Yeah, I think that it was. You know, it was very grandiose what I was up to in a way, you know, and all of us who were writing for that magazine, and we were paying people you to to go do these crazy things and not really considering the danger, that much, and and and there was a lot of you know there was we had, we had a lot of women in the office and some amazing women, but there was a lot of testosterone driving the bus and and I was trying to live up to, you know, the image in my own mind of who these people were John Krakauer and Bob Chikochis and others who seemed to so effortlessly go out into the wilds and and and do these crazy things and write great, great articles about it. That's what I wanted and and I kind of fell into a spell, you know, underneath that all I'm not sure, looking back, exactly, if my makeup was really built for that, especially given the traumas I'd had as a kid.
Speaker 2:You know, and've I've read enough psychology and know that there is this idea that Freud came up with of. I always forget it's, I forget the term right now, but essentially, you, you find yourself as an adult or later in life, re exposing yourself to the same dangers and same situations. As you try to heal it, your unconscious is trying to heal this, this disconnect and it's this wound you have. And for me, being in nature was terrifying and yet here I was, throwing myself into places like greenland and, you know, the amazon, and finding myself terrified a lot of the time.
Speaker 1:So so you go through this cycle of I found myself in reading your memoir like one of the like. This is this is audio only, so I'm doing this gesture of trying to pull someone like out of a. Well, right, like you start climbing up, you you get a cool assignment cause you still had the writing chops, and then then the medication and the malaise and everything you turn in a subpar product and then eventually you end up getting terminated by a lot of these right, yeah, you fall into this hole. Uh, talk to us about the travel that you were fortunate enough to do. That was really part of your healing journey.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Whether intentionally or not, when you set out to do it right. Talk to us about that, because that's where the book to me started to get really inspirational in a deep sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, so there's a shift that happens in the book where it actually is a quite intense one, where a friend of mine had died by suicide and as I was sitting with his body I just knew I had to get off these medications. I around that time I saw this little clip and I think it was the Wall Street Journal or something about the Jesus Trail, and it was a 40-mile trail from Nazareth to Capernaum, which is on the Sea of Galilee, and it approximates the path that a historical Jesus might have walked when he left his hometown of Nazareth to begin his three years of teaching. And so obviously that struck a chord in me, given my youth and I was no longer a Christian but man I got obsessed with this and that's one of my qualities, and maybe as part of a addictive personality, I get obsessed with story ideas and stories and told her about this and that I wanted to go hike it and write about it, and she said go, you know, immediately. And so I bought a plane ticket and, you know, 48 hours later I was walking the Jesus Trail, and that just whetted my appetite, though, you know, at that point then I wanted to go everywhere that Jesus had walked, and I was, you know, I was exploring whether I could be a Christian again, but I was also trying to get back in touch with myself and I became. I ended up going into Palestine. I spent 10 weeks, a 10-week pilgrimage in Israel and Palestine, in the West Bank, and then when I came back, I, you know, I realized that I didn't, wasn't going to be a Christian again, but I did light something up inside me about spirituality and that I knew that there was healing, that that was waiting for me if I followed a path of self compassion, of of seeking something greater than myself and knowing that my ego had played a role in my demise and needed to find some humility, like Jesus taught. And so it lit a fire in me and, yeah, that led to other things too. I could keep going. Please do, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, so when I got back, I had begun practicing yoga earlier and I really went full bore into practicing yoga at that time and really began exploring the Eastern wisdom paths and Buddhism and especially the philosophy around yoga, which, you know, here in the West we think of yoga as just stretching in a in Lululemons, but there's a whole philosophy behind it about um, that's involved with, you know, becoming more uh, you know, more in your body, more centered, you know, it kind of mirrors the Buddhist path in a way, um, and there's other elements of it, including, uh, you know, yoga of devotion and there's other elements of it, including, you know, yoga of devotion, and there's a whole kind of a Christian kind of path over in the yoga world too. So, anyway, I became, went down that rabbit hole and and just really healed a lot through that, through that exploration and finding myself again. And then I found myself back in India, which I'd visited for Wired Magazine in 1999 and just had written an article about the city of Bangalore, which was a tech center, and this was in 99. It was just taking off over there, and so I wrote this business article. But the whole time I just was thinking I wanted to go up and visit the city called Varanasi and it was where they burned bodies and people actually went there to die, because if you died in Varanasi, you were more inclined to achieve moksha, or freedom, and not have to come back into a human body. Well, I just had to see this place. So I went up there in 99.
Speaker 2:Well, back to my other main story in 2018, I just, I just became obsessed. I had to go back to India, and this time I went back to Northern India, and I found myself, about five days in, inside a cave where a hundred-year-old yogi lived. He'd been there for 25 years meditating and chanting and living, and a few friends and I went up. We heard about him and went up and visited him, and, you know, I spent the afternoon there, and when I entered his cave, though for the first time, the tradition is to bow at his feet. Well, I did that. And as I entered his cave, though, for the first time, the tradition is to bow at his feet. Well, I did that.
Speaker 2:And as I had my head on the floor, you know, I started to sit up. I felt him smack my head. This is going to sound, you know, maybe strange to us here in the West, but there is a whole tradition over there, a physical transmission of spiritual energy, and I was aware of that, and so the second it happened, I was like, is that what just happened? And I sat up and he smacked me on the head. I sat up and looked into his eyes and I just began weeping. It was just something the tenderness and the age and maybe the grandfatherliness of it and maybe related to my own difficulty with men and my father, but I just broke open and I wept all afternoon and I remember then going home that night and you know, and I woke up the next morning and I was watching these birds fly out over this valley and I realized I was sort of like feeling queasy or something.
Speaker 2:I stood up, I stumbled, eventually, you know, I went down to where, this cabin, where I was staying with my then girlfriend, and told her that I felt like someone had slipped me acid, you know, or mushrooms or something I just had. I felt like I was out of my mind on a drug or something. And so I ended up going up, climbing to the top of this building and had, you know, for the next 12 hours I just I saw snakes vibrating on the ground and all the mountains in the sky were knitted together. It was like a, like some kind of psychedelic experience and it lasted 12 hours and um, and I I interpret that even as a kind of a God experience, or it was a deep mystical experience that showed me, you know, that underneath all of ouri himself then, from the universe that was channeling through him. I don't know. You know, I know this sounds crazy and but yeah.
Speaker 1:When I read that at first I thought quite honestly. I thought, oh, here we got, we have the cliche right, we got the cliche of the, the, the Westerner, hiking the mountain, and then there's an old skinny dude up there and that was the end of it. And then you get smacked.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then the fallout right the process. It was messy and scary and terrifying actually Scary is an understatement, and to kind of to read that that was a pretty powerful experience. Were you still, I'm trying to recall, were you still on your medication at that point? Like layers and layers of meds?
Speaker 2:I was, I had been dwindling down, I had moved away from Stanford, I was living in Boulder, colorado, and this psychiatrist here had said let's get you off all of this and and, uh, figure out who you really are. And uh, and so I don't recall, I think I, you know, I was taking, I think, one antidepressant and uh, you know, to this day I take an antidepressant and I take a, an adhd med, and that's all and um, and so I was taking that at the time, um, um, and it was just, you know, as wild as the 12 hour mystical experience was, you know, the crying and the weeping was was just as impactful. It just opened something in me that like needed to open up the grief of years of of living, you know, of living with depression, living with hiding it, you know, I mean, there's a at that time my mother had died, and the grief around my mother's death, the grief of all the pain that, you know, not just I experienced, but you know we all experience. And I think that's one of the biggest gifts I want to talk about about this book is, you know, when I wrote the book, it came out of me in this way that like to write a book like this.
Speaker 2:It takes it does take some ego or something you know. It takes thinking that your story is worth listening to and and that it's a little bit special or something. But but you know, but by the time I finished the book and then I began talking about it and marketing it, the more and more I realized it was such a universal experience, a very universal. In the suburbs where I grew up, where you have these families that appear to be all in the up and up and yet there's all this suffering going on, but also just worldwide. There's all this suffering going on, and but also just worldwide. You know that's there's far more suffering than I've experienced around the world. But it just opens something up in me and and writing the book allowed me to see kind of the universal aspect of all of this.
Speaker 1:So you return to the theme of slowing down.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:In previous conversations we had you mentioned that and I believe it's in the book as well, and I can even tell in the way you're relating this right now that this is after India didn't have the frenetic pace to it. Yeah, the distraction, the built-in escape elements that that your prior life had. Talk to us about, about that and then how that led into the work you're doing today. Yeah, where you know, I thought, wow, this is interesting. A guy who's suffered this much and has faced his suffering in a public way with a memoir, and now he's dedicating his energies to helping other people go through a really difficult process. Like, aren't you done with the suffering? So, like you know what I mean, you're dipping your toe in with everybody you work with.
Speaker 2:So talk to us about that slowing down and then how you segue into being a coach, really, and a guide Right, Well, so, you know, writing is what I've always done, and editing and, um, and I started to teach, uh, and I landed a job working as a, as a teacher of memoir. Uh, when I started to teach, and I landed a job working as a, as a teacher of memoir when I moved to Colorado, and it just slowly developed into into a coaching business. But it's more than that, though, because it's, you know, over the years, I just did a lot of what I call self-compassion work, and you're right to use the word slow down. You know I was no longer traveling around the world, I was spending a lot of time doing, you know, practices like meditating and practicing yoga, and I had slowed my life down. I'd found a lot more compassion for myself and I started this business of working with people on their memoirs and, you know, I just I just loved it.
Speaker 2:You know I have this capacity to hear people's stories and reflect back to them, kind of a. You know that there's legitimacy there's, there's something to be said there. There's. There's not just legitimacy, but there's gold there to offer people in telling our stories. And and I was, you know, I found that, that I just love this work and, and you know, helping people because I had been, you know, eventually, when I wrote my own memoir, I saw how much it healed, and there was so much that that just of my suffering receded into the background almost like like into the rear view mirror when I, when I hit send on my manuscript, it was just a release and I, you know, I'd seen people say that writing memoir was healing.
Speaker 2:But I experienced it in a way that you know I'm convinced of it, and so I learned to walk people through the process of telling their story, being vulnerable but also, you know, turning it into a gift for somebody. You know, when we write a memoir, you know memoirists kind of get a bad rap that they're narcissistic and it's you know that they must think they're really special to do this and I actually think it's the opposite. I think writing a memoir is such an antidote to narcissism. It's like if you can get vulnerable about your life, you know, and share the suffering you've been through, but share the stuff that helped you heal, you basically give somebody else a roadmap that they can see themselves in the story and you give this great offering to other people in the world that to show that healing is possible, transformation is possible, and it just has become this joy in my life.
Speaker 1:So I'd imagine that when it's all distilled down there, there are probably just a few essential themes that pop up in in a lot of the memoir work. You know we were, we were doing a lot of scenarios. It was a week long, very intensive training and the end of the week, like the facilitator said, hey, did you guys realize that there's like three themes that that all of our conflicts had in common, that we talked about and you're going to see these all over, and one of them is like people are seeking a sense of recognition and belonging. Yeah, right, you know they want to be heard. And I thought about those and then I thought about in in preparing for today's conversation with you, I thought about the memoir journey, like when you boil it down and you get past all the trappings of of the quote-unquote interesting things people have done.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm wondering if you come down to just a few essential themes, are you seeing, you're right, you know, and, and I obviously one of the every memoir is a story of how you became. You know you today. But but the deeper theme of that really is is often coming home to oneself and um, and you know, and so in the in belonging in one's own body and belonging in one's own life. And you know, a good memoir never has a really tidy ending and no one you know, it's not true that we ever arrive in some place of full enlightenment, but there's always something else going to come down the pike. But there is transformation as possible, and becoming more comfortable with who one is is one of the biggest themes. It's almost like in self-love in a weird way ends up becoming you know by the end. It's sort of like everybody's just learning to accept this path they've been on and seeing it almost as necessary to become who they are. And so you're right about that and yeah, it's this.
Speaker 1:Uh, yeah, I know we had spoken about the hero's journey and that joseph campbell and or, like odysseus, you know, returning home and and some things are the same and some things aren't right, yeah some things have moved on in your time and exactly you know and you kind of return to yourself, but yourself is somewhat shifted and you've got a boon, as campbell would say, you've got.
Speaker 2:You've got a gift to share with how you, how you did, how you slayed the dragons, both in the external world and in the internal world, you know how do you, how do you help your clients navigate this?
Speaker 1:because the reality is very few of them. Like in any, in any writing venture. Very few people are going to write a bestseller, right like that's, the numbers just don't play out that way. And most people don't even get a a big commercial publishing contract. Right like that's not. That's also not how the numbers play out. If you're not a celebrity and if you are a celebrity, it's usually someone else wrote it for you anyway Um, so how do you navigate that whole reality with people who are very enthusiastic about their memoirs and then they're going to have to face some sort of reality and then you know, like, how, like, how does that journey look?
Speaker 2:the good news is that that self-publishing and hybrid publishing has become really a legitimate thing now, and so so, on the one hand, you know those who really want to publish there's so many options and there are people that sell more books, reach more people with self-publishing and what's called hybrid publishing than do with landing big contracts. So that's one aspect. But then the other aspect is, you know this healing part of it, and I try to really keep people focused on doing the work. That there's the. You know that the payoff is multifaceted and I try to keep a little bit of a minimal view of the publishing aspect and that we've got it. We.
Speaker 2:You know step one is a writing a book that you love and that is hopefully has some technical aspects to it, that the that people love to read and so. But then the other, yeah, so there's just there's. It's kind of I try to keep people focused on the journey and and sort of like, let letting whatever happens to it happens to it, I kind of not to get too woo woo, but there's sort of what's supposed to happen in this case really does happen.
Speaker 1:So what's the hybrid Is that's? That's some. You do some of it self-publishing and then like explain that to yeah.
Speaker 2:So there are some companies now that are called hybrid publishers. They're kind of in between self-publishing and big time traditional publishing. And these companies and there are some really reputable ones they will, you know, edit your book, you know, come up with a cover and get it into bookstores just like a publisher. The only catch is, instead of you getting paid which is what happens in traditional publishing you pay them but they're actually getting the book into bookstores. They have marketing teams publishing, you pay them but they're actually getting the book into bookstores or getting there and they have marketing teams.
Speaker 2:And so it's like, you know, it's not cheap, but it's a way you can get your book into the world in a real way. And it does have, and they don't take everybody, by the way. So there's, you know, for better, for worse, the gatekeeping at the big publishers kind of. You know, there's some gatekeeping in a good way. I want everyone to have their book into the world and you can with self-publishing, but some of these publishers are good at really finding writers they want to work with, cultivating them and putting their stuff into the world in a good way, in a good way, you know.
Speaker 1:So and and you've, you've lived the. You've lived in an extraordinary period of time, I think, when it comes to commercial writing, right, like cause, when you, I'd imagine, were you born 30 years later, you would have had a very different career. Yeah, like as an adventure writer, right, I think you might've even mentioned this in your book. But, yeah, you know, between just the, just between the what am I trying to say? Like between AI, which is its own beast, and then just online journalist, whatever that looks like, and research that could perhaps be some portion of it be done remotely. You know, when you started, there was no, hey, I'm going to Google, I'm going to do Google earth and look at this. It was like I got to buy a plane ticket and get my rear end there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I hit the sweet spot. The nineties is, in particular, were a golden period for magazines. Then they were very thick, pre-internet, you know, all the advertising was going into these print ads and you and we all had big magazines on our coffee tables and they were prestigious and and all of that and uh so, and there was money in it and money for travel. So I hit, I hit a sweet spot in terms of my career. You know, now I find myself, uh, you know, writing articles that would have gotten paid $10,000 for. You know, back in the nineties. I'm doing it for free, you know, because it's part of my, you know, part of what I love and also part of my business plan, and also, you know, just part of putting, keep putting stories into the world.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I, and tell us about your, your substack work as well. So so again, if let us know that, the title of the, the full title of your, of your memoir, where to find it? And then also your sub stack, because that's really what drew me to your work initially, and then I went and got the book.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so my book is called into the soul of the world my journey to healing, and it's available. It was published by Hachette in 2023. And it's available at all the big bookstores and through Amazon, and you can order it through your other, your favorite indie bookstore. Um, it's available everywhere and uh, so that's my book and, um, it is the story of how I became an adventure writer, how my life fell apart and how I kind of pieced it back together through through all these different ways, as you know, and then so my sub stack is called Seeking Letters to the Restless, so it's a newsletter that is free right now anyway, and you can sign up for it.
Speaker 2:Look up Seeking Letters to the Restless. And you know, I try to write kind of adventurous stories about seeking oneself, seeking some kind of understanding of what a spiritual life might be when you're full of doubt. It's sort of a it's for everybody who kind of longs to have some connection with something greater than themselves, but also lives in the world of science, so it's kind of like has a foot in both worlds. I'm constantly trying to understand what that means.
Speaker 1:So To listeners I highly recommend it as well as to pick up a copy of the book. I read the book and then I was going back and checking out some of the sub stack and there was one where where I think you had you'd, you'd gone down to the river and you you, I can't remember you went swimming or something and I was like, oh no, not, not a river, not a red, stay away from the river, yeah, but but I think it's an, it's an interesting recurring kind of theme in your life. It is.
Speaker 2:You know, I'm drawn to rivers. When I lived more in downtown boulder I would walk the river every day and it would never even it never crossed my mind that the weird connection it was with it. So I've been to rivers all over the world and been obsessed with them. And so there's. You know, freud was I don't know how, if everything was right, but he wasn't a dummy either.
Speaker 1:So well, there's a. I lived in Santa Fe for a long time, right yeah, the Pecos River.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:So I grew up this is a crazy aside, but I grew up hearing stories about my maternal grandparents who had moved from upstate New York to the Santa Fe area so my grandfather, who had tuberculosis, could be in the dry air Before antibiotics. That's what they told you to do, and they had no money, and so they rented a little shack on the banks of the Pecos River and the only way to get to that shack was to walk across a swinging bridge across the Pecos River, and I've spent the last I don't know how many decades trying to find where that is. I'm sure all the structures are gone now or whatever, but to try to find where that is, and I have not been able to get back there.
Speaker 2:Well, we'll have to go down there sometime. Yeah, down there, come out and let's go find it. I'd love to do that.
Speaker 1:I hope that's in your memoir, so yeah yeah, I mean, I, I have these stories of these in my mind, like of of my grandparents raising, raising rabbits, because that that was what I had been told like they were. He was ill, he was ill and she took care of him and they raised rabbits to sell, and it was just on the banks of the pecos river. And now my mom and two of my brothers and their families live in santa fe. So, um, you know, who would you know? It's interesting, these recurring, these loops. Right that we come back to, we try to, we try. I read this thing the other day and it's somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but but it said why are my parents always so good at pushing my buttons? I know why Because they implanted them there and it's just like these. This is not a knock on my parents' back it's like those themes, right that come back.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know it's the boomerang stuff.
Speaker 2:A good memoir does have that kind of looping. The past and the present are kind of constantly revisited and things that happened at one point in life end up coming up as memories later. And yeah, there's a lot of that in a memoir, so in life too, as you know. So I bet you we can find this place on the Pecos.
Speaker 1:We probably could. Yeah, now I'm. Now I'm going to get obsessed like you Did you and I don't want to dive too deep into this because I know it's a personal journey but were there ever times when you were writing your memoir where you were like, dude, what are you doing? Like, like this is just rehashing things. Like this is just rehashing things, and I'm already a successful writer by the way. That's the style of writing is kind of a hybrid. I love the fact that you're such an effective writer, apart from the memoir theme right, because a lot of memoirs it's just hard to get into the actual, to live into the non-fictional dream part, because it's just writing's not effective, so I love that part.
Speaker 1:But like, were there times when you said I should just be writing about something much more factual, real world, and be done with it.
Speaker 2:You know, at some point I became under the spell of memoirs, and I think it was around 2013. I started reading a lot of them, I began teaching them and and began to understand what makes one you know better than than another, and and and I just it became kind of this obsession. Like we talked about obsessions and so, you know, at that I knew I was going to write one.
Speaker 2:You know whether I ever had, you know, I think writing about life became and I realized I kind of had a superpower about it, and so, yeah, there's lots of amazing things to write about, and I think you can always write about those other amazing things through a personal lens, always write about those other amazing things through a personal lens. And that, to me, became a lot more interesting than just going out and writing in a like you write a profile of somebody and that's fun, but if you write a personal essay about your meeting with them, then you have a lot more room to go down different rows and what's this person mean to me, what you know, as well as exploring them. So it's kind of a it became a bit of obsession to write in a personal way about the world, so so I think there's a both and to it, I guess, is what I'm saying it's interesting, as you're, as you're speaking, I I'm also a fan of uh, I can never pronounce his last name sebastian junger.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, the the perfect storm guy, right, and of course the perfect storm is a non-fiction, you know, just this amazing narrative of courage and also a real foolhardy story of thinking. From that to then some wartime reporting and some PTSD related experiences. And then now his last two books are you know, he had one about a walk that he took as he was going through a divorce. Yeah, latest one, I think, think, is in my year of dying. I don't know if you've read that, but I have not read that yet, but it's on my shelf yeah it's, it's, it's pretty powerful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and here's this and I'm not gonna spoil alert, I'm not, I'm not gonna ruin it for you. But like to this guy who was writing about ships and and storms and all that, and king crab fishing and or no, actually it wasn't, it was tuna or whatever that to now writing about what it's like to nearly die and be staring into the abyss well, I know, you know, I think a as we age we get more reflective and but also I know he's had some pts and that you know, the past and the present merge together with PTSD and it becomes a very fascinating thing to write about.
Speaker 2:So I think it's natural for those of us on the other side of you know 45 or 50 to be going down this road, especially him who's done, you know, war reporting and has some serious, you know, has seen some things. So Do you have another memoir in you? I do, and I've been talking with my agent about it and it's probably pretty reflective of what I've been writing about lately. It's the seeking, you know, which is a theme in my other memoir. But for the longest time I've wanted to have faith in God and it's been an obsession. And I've also, as a person who appreciates science and was a very scientist, journalist and was very just the facts ma'am kind of a guy. I had these two sides and they're always at war, and so the book will be exploring this kind of discussion, the inner discussion I've had about faith. So, and very different though from my memoir, it won't be organized as a chronologically as a story. It'll be kind of thematically oriented. So you know a few stories from the past in it, but some new ones too.
Speaker 1:I can't wait to uh, to read that. It sounds, sounds like a, uh, a great follow-up to, to your first memoir. What, what is uh? What does your family think about? Um, I, that's a, that's a. I'm asking, I'm asking for a friend. I'm actually asking because, as I begin to put pen to paper on some of my experiences, that's always the little voice here that's like hey, wait, can I say that? And if I do, I know I should, and in what way? And so what does your family say? And your friends? And you've got ex-partners and the whole, the whole piece.
Speaker 2:You know, I think that one of the things that that got me ready to write my book I did, I did a fair amount of therapy and I and one of the things I finally was able to understand is, all of us have different stories. You know even even siblings in a family, you know. You know even even siblings in a family, you know there's. You know kids have different relationships with their parents than other kids, and plus birth order, and so no story. And I used to think that my story had to match up. We talked about that with my dad, this obsession that needed to match up, and finally I let go of that.
Speaker 2:I'm someone who takes reality very seriously and I know I can. I've learned over time I can really trust my own reality, even when it's at odds with somebody else's, and that was that became the linchpin I had to kind of arrive at to get comfortable writing memoir. You know my dad and I are friendly. Now we have a kind of a growing wonderful relationship. He's, he's, you know he's 87 now, um, and not in great health. Um, um, you know my brother and I haven't spoken in years and and uh, so that's a painful thing. Um, and as far as friends, I think they probably some of them roll their eyes at me.
Speaker 2:I mean, the intensity with which I write about my life is not everybody's cup of tea, and it sort of is, and I don't care, you know. I have found. You know, going back to one of the gifts of memoir is. You know and I was writing about this today on Substack in a comment, a note to someone who commented on my piece is when you start living, finally, your authentic life, it's weird how, like things start to click, people come into your life who you haven't been there because you've been hiding yourself and they didn't know you were you. And so your life begins to change when you put stuff out there for the better, you know and people finally see who you really are, and you'll you'll pull in people who you're meant to be with and you'll you'll repel the people that can't handle it or don't think it's it's not for them.
Speaker 1:So Wow, that's a, this whole, the idea of, of, of truth, right. Whose truth is the truth Right?
Speaker 2:And so honesty is the word that I kind of lean more heavily into. I do love the word truth, but I also know in memoir writing we just try to be as honest as we can, you know, and knowing that the truth is elusive and no one has a lock on it, and yeah, it's so interesting, as you say, that I think about things that happened to me as a kid, and or I'll be sitting hanging out with my siblings or on a phone call and we're joking around.
Speaker 1:We're like, hey, you remember that time that this happened and we were both there.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Perspective and granted, it's like 35, 40 years ago, but the perspective is totally different.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Totally different. Yeah, now I don't know which is. I know what I can feel in my body and that's all I can really speak to. But then I think, man, like, how much of it was, how much of it has shifted to in my retelling and my recasting of it internally over all these years, and I don't even think it really matters that much, right, like it's what it is right now for me.
Speaker 2:Memory is is a very complicated thing and it is faulty. And the more you learn about memory, they think now that every time you have a memory you think of some memory. The more recent version of that is what gets filed away. So, you know, throw in writing about something. Now, you know, when I think back at some of the stuff I've written about, the image I have is the image that I wrote about. And I'm not sure I can even access the original memories of years ago. You know, because it's become a contemporary memory. It's complicated, you know.
Speaker 1:How was the experience of having?
Speaker 2:an editor work on this, on a memoir, as opposed to you writing about, you know, whatever Whitewater Rapids in the Grand Canyon or something you know. First of all, I love editors. I was one and I have always worked with. You know, I was surrounded by great ones at Outside. My work always got better when I worked with editors, so I've been very, always very accepting of collaborating, knowing that writing gets better when you have a smart person pushing you and helping you. Try to get clear about what you're trying to say. As far as the memoir itself, you know, I I think because getting my truth out, or getting my honest version out, was, was so important to me. You know, I had lived, uh, I'd had a lot of of my experience denied in my, in my family, and, and it was like just simmering underneath me, not in anger so much, and like I just had to get my version of it out and festering and festering.
Speaker 2:And so I was so open in writing my book I go, I go deeper and more, probably more revealing than than a lot of people do in memoirs and way more than even I. You know, I don't ask. I try to help my, my students get vulnerable and my clients I also know they've got to set their guardrails for what they're willing to share. There's some great memoirs out there that don't go to the bone quite like mine does. Um, it's just part of my nature that I do that. I don't know understand why Um, no-transcript author and the reader. But yeah, I hope that makes sense. I was open to it. I loved it actually.
Speaker 1:It's how, how can? So you've talked about the book, where obviously people can find it online bookstores, your sub stack. You've got this, this. Um, I'm not going to call it a side business, because it's the central business, right, it's the? It's what you do as well, right, is you write and you do this, uh, guiding and coaching and mentoring. How do people find you and what, what does it look like if someone's listening to this and they're like, hey, I've always people always tell me I have cool stories to tell. Or people always shocked when I tell them something and and oh man, dude, you should write a book, you know. And then you're like oh my God, what do I? Where do I start? How do do people find you and what does that guiding look like?
Speaker 2:yeah, so you find me at bradwetzlercom and that's b-r-a-d-w-e-t-z-l-e-rcom, and uh, you can read about my services there and you can also sign up there for a free 30-minute consult, and that's really step one. So sign up and let's, let's talk for 30 minutes. I'll actually coach you, you know, give you some, some ideas, for if you, whether you, first of all, we'll talk about working together, but also even if you don't want to work with me, I'll, I'll coach you for 30 minutes. So that's step one. And then you know I have different plans and they can. You know we can talk about that. I have six-month write-your-memoir plans at various prices, and basically we meet either two times, three times or four times a month and I walk you through the process of writing your book and getting your draft done.
Speaker 1:Again, I encourage listeners to check that out. Encourage listeners to check that out. If I'm sure you know, most of us have at some point had someone go, wow, that really you've lived quite a life and yeah, you know you should. You should write some of this down, um, and you know it's an interesting.
Speaker 1:Again, I return to this theme of I think there's because the internet sphere lends itself to people being quote unquote experts in a lot of stuff, coaches in a lot of stuff, right, and then you're like, yeah, you dive in and into it and you go were they ever successful at the original thing or were they? Are they just successful at coaching people to to do something that they've never even done? Right, people to to do something that they've never even done, right, um, and you've done. You've done the hard work. You've been the professional writer, you've lived that, um, and you understand the process, understand working with an editor. And then you've also gone through the incredibly, uh, you know the process of opening yourself up to writing your memoir. You could have dodged that whole thing. Your life, your whole life.
Speaker 2:It wasn't meant to be. You know, to dodge it, it was. You know. I think I was a truth teller in my family and it was. I've lived it as an adult too now, so it's something I just it's part of my DNA. You know. I've got to say what's true about my life and the world.
Speaker 1:You've been so generous with your time, brad, and I truly appreciate this opportunity to sit down and chat with you and I encourage everybody to check out all the information we talked about today and I'll put it in the show notes. I wanted to finish with just a question that I ask all the guests. If you had the opportunity to design a billboard and you can't have the cop out of like I don't believe in billboards because they're visual pollution. A couple of people have said that. I'm like okay, this is thought exercise. Okay, you can make it biodegradable. I know you live in Boulder. You have the opportunity to design a billboard for the side of a thoroughfare or freeway. What does that billboard say about what you believe in, who you are, what you find to be important?
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, what you believe in, who you are, what you find to be important, yeah, um, you know, I think probably in keeping with my sub stack, I would. It would be something along the lines of keep seeking, you know, keep, keep saying what's true, keep looking for what's true about you and your place in the world, and that there's uh, um, and trusting your experience, all those things. That's not a very tidy billboard, uh, but, but you know, coming home to trust who you are and trust your experience and keep opening up, that's the message. I think that it leads to healing.
Speaker 1:I thank you for that. I think that's an apropos place to pause the conversation and I can feel in our conversation that you've at some level come home to a place of peace and reflection and reflectiveness. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to coach other people in that authentically either.
Speaker 2:Yes, it's a good time in my life. It's sort of I have arrived here at a place of, of, of calm and and maybe not ease. I'm always pushing myself to to do, to do new things, but this is, this is a good season for me and I'm cherishing it.
Speaker 1:So Well, thank you so much, Brad, and and it's been an honor to speak with you.
Speaker 2:Thank you, David. It's been honored Likewise.
Speaker 1:Thanks for joining us on the hangout podcast. You can send us an email at podcastinfo at protonme. Many thanks to my daughter, maya, for editing this episode. I'd also like to underline that this podcast is entirely separate from my day job and, as such, all opinions expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thanks for coming on in and hanging out.
