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Ian Bennett: Milwaukee Wave Champion

Ian Bennett: Milwaukee Wave Champion

When it comes to the MASL and Milwaukee Wave Ian Bennett is a certified legend, he’s a two-time MASL MVP and three-time champion with the Milwaukee Wave

When it comes to the MASL and Milwaukee Wave Ian Bennett is a certified legend, he’s a two-time MASL MVP and three-time champion with the Milwaukee Wave, he is also still performing at a high level this season at the age of 40.

That said there is a lot more to Ian Bennett than what you see on the field. The guy is a father of two daughters, has more energy than just about anyone I’ve ever met and his authentic unfiltered nature made for a great and highly entertaining podcast.

The episode kicks off with Ian discussing what it’s like to be nearly double the age of some of his teammates and get gets pressed on his responsibility to show them the ropes on and off the field, which segways into where the Wave go to celebrate a night out (it is quite a few places in Milwaukee) as well as what they do after a loss.

Richie and Ian also dive into his upbringing of playing soccer (and American football) growing up in Canada, how he barely got into college passing his SAT on the number and started his career as an outdoor player in Charleston, SC before transitioning to the indoor star that he is today.

The Standard Five, sponsored by Central Standard Distillery, delivers rapid-fire questions, touching on Ian’s greatest soccer moment, his Canadian obsession with maple syrup, and even his love for McDonald’s, and if Canadian’s are actually more friendly than Midwesterners. The episode wraps up with Ian’s  love for life, his motivation, and his deep appreciation for the people and home he’s found here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Follow Milwaukee Uncut on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/milwaukeeuncut/

Milwaukee Uncut is produced by Story Mark Studios

 


Transcript

[00:00:00] Ian Bennett: Dude, you want me you want me to get released man. Oh my gosh. How do you know? Okay, so we’re supposed to keep I mean the kids are watching maybe kids are not watching But yeah, you already 

[00:00:08] Ian Bennett: told them what the wave players do after I know but like I just don’t want my secrets Also, I love life man. I love meeting good people and that’s probably why I stayed i’ve stayed in wisconsin so long Hey, everyone.

[00:00:19] Richie Burke: It’s your host, Richie Burke. Welcome back to Milwaukee Uncut. My guest today is a two time M. A. S. L. MVP and a three time champion with the Milwaukee Wave. He has represented both the Canadian national team in futsal and beach soccer. He’s a father of two. He’s, he’s 40 and he’s still going strong on the field.

[00:00:37] Richie Burke: He’s got more energy than literally any, anyone I know. He’s hilarious. This is a highly entertaining episode today. Before we dive in. Just a reminder, Milwaukee Uncut is presented by Nicolet Law, the Midwest’s personal injury law firm, Fear the Beard, as well as Central Standard Distillery, home of my favorite vodka, Door County Cherry Vodka, and in partnership with our friends over at On Milwaukee.

[00:01:03] Richie Burke: Now let’s dive in to today’s episode with Ian Bennett. Speaking of, you are 40. 

[00:01:10] Ian Bennett: Haha, yeah, I’m 40, I’m 40. 40 young, I guess, we can say that. 

[00:01:14] Richie Burke: What is it like being a professional athlete? I saw you, you guys just drafted someone who was born in 2002. 

[00:01:20] Ian Bennett: Dude, don’t even remind me. So like, you know when you play a sport, and then like, you’re one of those jokers when you talk kind of trash to the old people?

[00:01:28] Ian Bennett: And the old guys, and you’re like, oh, you’re so old. I’m that guy, but the good thing is over, I’m not gonna lie. Like I can still keep up with them. So I think that saves me. Cause I don’t get those old jokes a lot. Sometimes you just talk about, cause my age, I am 40 logistic, right? Like it’s legit. I’m 40, but I don’t look like 40.

[00:01:45] Ian Bennett: Like, dude, I don’t look for it. This body doesn’t look like 40. If I took off my clothes, there’s no 40. There’s no four. There’s more like 26. Even if you kept them on. I mean, yeah, I appreciate that. See, that makes me feel good. I appreciate that. 

[00:01:55] Richie Burke: Yeah. I mean, you got, yeah. Looks like you have maybe a nice skincare routine going.

[00:01:59] Richie Burke: You got a nice beard. How’s the hair you’re wearing? 

[00:02:04] Ian Bennett: I’m good. Yeah. No grays, no nothing. Like I got good genes. Amen to my parents. I got good genes. I moisturize. People don’t understand. You have to lotion. All right. Doesn’t matter what in this city you are. Skin color, moisturize. Drink water, and moisturize.

[00:02:20] Ian Bennett: And you’ll feel good. You’ll be good. 

[00:02:22] Richie Burke: Yeah, uh, my girlfriend Bre finally got me to start doing skin care. See? For the first time. I wish I started earlier. Ha ha ha! That’s awesome. I don’t know how well it’s working, but I did start that. Yeah, I started doing Rogaine a long time ago and that, that has not worked as well for me, but I’m hoping to have better luck on the skin care side of things.

[00:02:41] Richie Burke: Do you take the guys out much? Do you, do you feel like you need to show them, show them the scene, show them around? Do you feel that kind of responsibility? And I’m guessing you also want to set an example for them at the same time, but you got to show them a good time. 

[00:02:55] Ian Bennett: Yeah, a hundred percent. So basically I always say if we win.

[00:02:59] Ian Bennett: We go, we go nuts, right? Well, we, we drink, um, we have a good time. I’ll take you to these bars. If we lose, it’s, it’s, we got two drink minimum. Probably going to go home, um, because you got to set the standard, right? 

[00:03:12] Richie Burke: Two, two drink maximum. 

[00:03:14] Ian Bennett: Yeah, I mean, no, there’s a minimum. You have to drink two at least and then you’re done.

[00:03:17] Ian Bennett: So, but like, but you, you’re drinking. So if we lose, you’re drinking maybe if you drink or not, but you’re not happy. But when we win. You’re drinking. We’re having a good time because you just got to set the standard. If you lose, you can’t be happy about that. Right. And some people like these days and age.

[00:03:34] Ian Bennett: They lose and they’re still happy and it doesn’t, I’m a little old school when it comes to that stuff. 

[00:03:38] Richie Burke: If someone wants to party with the Milwaukee Wave after a game, where, where are you guys 

[00:03:43] Ian Bennett: going? Oh man. Okay. So we got, I got a shout out to Goolsby’s. They always take care of us. So we just go there because a lot of players we don’t eat before we play because we want to stay loose.

[00:03:52] Ian Bennett: Get those wings. Yeah. So we get the wings. We like Calderone Club. I’m a big guy with like Italian. I love Italian. Um, cause I’m Canadian. I grew up with a lot of Italians. So I love that place. Um, the ambassador hotel, big sponsor too. They always put us on and they have good food. So we hit one of those. Um, and then after, I mean, we’re out, we’re out, Richie, like, we’re out.

[00:04:13] Richie Burke: You’re not, you’re not dodging this question. Are we, are we talking Joe Cats? We talking RWB? 

[00:04:17] Ian Bennett: No, I’ll be honest. No, no, no, I’ll be honest. Yeah, we’re, we’re hitting Joe Cats. We’re hitting, um, 720. We’re, we’re on Brady. We’re everywhere. Like, so you could find us, I mean, we sometimes split up, conquer and divide, divide and conquer.

[00:04:30] Ian Bennett: So, I mean. Yeah, we’re doing it. 

[00:04:32] Richie Burke: How is club 720 these days? I have not been in there in a long time. You know, that like tap in trend on instagram right now when you’re 21. I saw P fat post a photo from there when she was 21. Um, but yeah, how’s 720? 

[00:04:46] Ian Bennett: That’s been good. White tail has been a new little spot.

[00:04:49] Ian Bennett: That’s been good too. Um, but yeah, I mean, we’re just out and about and when When the games are over, if we win. So, we’re having fun. 

[00:04:56] Richie Burke: Yeah, you guys are everywhere. I like that. And, it’s not like you have a game the next day, usually, right? 

[00:05:02] Ian Bennett: So sometimes if we have it back to back, yeah, we won’t, but if we don’t, yeah, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll have a good time.

[00:05:07] Ian Bennett: I’ll take these guys out, kind of show them the ropes a little bit. Yeah. 

[00:05:10] Richie Burke: Um, do you just burn all that off the next day? How do you stay in such good shape? Does it come back to genetics? 

[00:05:16] Ian Bennett: Yeah, I think genetics and then obviously how you take care of your body. I think diet is massive. Um, you got to always stay hydrated.

[00:05:23] Ian Bennett: That helps injuries prevention. And then again, stretching, doing all that stuff, right? If you’re out and about, just partying a lot, it’s gonna catch up to you, right? 

[00:05:31] Richie Burke: Yeah, you know, I’ve, I’ve found, um, It’s hard for me to minimize a hangover these days. It’s just, you know, if I reach a certain level, I’m just done.

[00:05:39] Richie Burke: But, Central Standard Door County Cherry Vodka with Electrolyte Powder, pretty good mix. 

[00:05:45] Ian Bennett: Man, I gotta try that then. You should. I’m a more of a rum guy though, but that’s, that’s what’s up. 

[00:05:49] Richie Burke: That’s good, that’s good too. Alright, um, That was some good insights right there. Your backstory, you’re Canadian. You grew up in Hamilton, Canada, population 600, 000, close to Toronto, played football and soccer, excelled in the classroom.

[00:06:05] Richie Burke: Can you talk about your up? Dude, I love it. Or is that not accurate? Did I not do my homework correctly? You got like a 17 on the ACT. I heard you got into college. How would you hear about 

[00:06:18] Ian Bennett: that? How that’s, that’s like serious information. How’d you know 

[00:06:22] Richie Burke: about that? I do work. I take this podcast seriously.

[00:06:25] Richie Burke: Okay. 

[00:06:26] Ian Bennett: So I’m going to be honest with you. So I got a scholarship, like they’re like, Ian, you got a scholarship. All you got to do is, um, is get a 17 on the ACT. So I was like, Oh man, I’m going to get better than that. That’s like the minimum. I’m like, isn’t that just barely passing? So I’m like, okay. So I studied for like a week.

[00:06:41] Ian Bennett: Um, and mind you, I try hard. I don’t think I’m the smartest dude, but like I give a hundred percent. So anyways, went to there, um, went to take the test, feeling good, feeling like a baller. Um, coach calls me, he’s like, Ian, you’re in. Like, you got, you passed, you’re in. So I’m like, okay, cool. That’s awesome. I’m, I’m hyped up.

[00:07:00] Ian Bennett: I go, but what did I get? He’s like, you sure you want to know? I’m like, yeah, man, I studied hard. 17. Dude, I was so hyped and I’m not going to lie. I was a little bit sad. I was like, cause I really never get sad, but I was kind of like, dang, like I got a 17, like that’s what I needed. So whatever that, I mean that helped, but I, so I got to school, I got to college.

[00:07:21] Ian Bennett: Um, graduated, um, summa cum laude, all that stuff. No, I’m joking. 

[00:07:26] Richie Burke: Marion college, junior college in Indiana. 

[00:07:29] Ian Bennett: No, it’s NAIA. So now it’s a university. So 

[00:07:32] Richie Burke: now it’s a university. So you go pro, you get your professional start with the Charleston battery. Yeah, I heard you were just a machine on and off the field in Charleston.

[00:07:43] Richie Burke: Can you tell us about that to that time? 

[00:07:45] Ian Bennett: How are you knowing all, like, it’s so crazy. Like I’m, you got me tripping right now. No, but so Canadian kid, there’s like no beaches. I’m I get drafted to Charleston. It’s like a whole new world. There’s beaches. You get done with practice. The weather’s amazing. It’s fantastic.

[00:08:02] Ian Bennett: And then. And I’m like, so wait, after practice, I can just go head to the beach. And then I’m like, wait, this doesn’t make sense. Like I thought we were like, it was just so much fun. So I think I had too much fun and not enough like focus. Because I thought I already made it. Right. I thought I’ll play in Charleston and then I’ll go to the MLS.

[00:08:22] Ian Bennett: And I kind of just kind of slacked on my game. I really wasn’t in the gym. I wasn’t perfecting my craft and I kind of just enjoyed. My time there, probably too much. Let’s 

[00:08:32] Richie Burke: just say solid talent in Charleston, 

[00:08:35] Ian Bennett: Charleston. Oh my gosh. It’s just good people. Like, I mean, there was good looking men, good looking women.

[00:08:41] Ian Bennett: Like I can’t discriminate. It was amazing. It was awesome. 

[00:08:44] Richie Burke: Pair of the city of Charleston to a night at RWB. 

[00:08:49] Ian Bennett: Let’s just say, uh, it’s, it’s. We’re behind let’s just say we’re behind let’s just say that fine, but it’s still good You know, I love my any 

[00:08:57] Richie Burke: advice you’d give the staff at RWB to step it up a notch 

[00:09:00] Ian Bennett: No, I just think we don’t get the Sun as much, you know, like that’s that’s the thing the Sun You know, we need the Sun and we can’t do anything about that right in the winter.

[00:09:07] Ian Bennett: It’s like it’s tough 

[00:09:09] Richie Burke: All right. So so then you transition to indoor you do not make the MLS Did you did you did you ever want to go to the MLS after you like hit your stride in 

[00:09:18] Ian Bennett: Milwaukee? Yeah, I think that was, I think that was always the goal. But then honestly, I ended up, I had my daughter, right? And then that’s where I was like, man, I’m going to have to travel a lot.

[00:09:27] Ian Bennett: I got to try to establish myself again. And I reestablished myself as an indoor player. So then I was like, you know what, let’s just ride this out and let’s be there for my kids and. And make sure I’m part of their lives. Cause again, I’m a guy that’s like hands on, right? I want to be there. I want to take them to school.

[00:09:42] Ian Bennett: I want to do all that thing. And plus, I want to give them that swag that I have, right? Imagine a kid growing up and they got swag and they’re confident and stuff. It’s amazing. And my two daughters, I’m not lying to you, they got swag for like two girls. I’m confident with them. No boys are going to mess with them.

[00:09:58] Ian Bennett: Like they’ve got it down pat. And then that makes me feel like I did a good job, right? They’re good kids, but you can’t play with them. They’re they’re, they’re cool. 

[00:10:07] Richie Burke: Hey everyone. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Milwaukee Uncut presented by Central Standard and Nicolet Lodge. Just a reminder that we are selecting a winner every week to send a new.

[00:10:18] Richie Burke: Limited edition, nice Milwaukee uncut hat made by AKA Custom Lids and, and a gift card to Central Standards Craft House to be entered in this drawing. All you have to do is pause the episode right now. I don’t even know if you have to do that, but just make sure you’re subscribed and write a review on Apple or Spotify and just leave your Instagram handle or your email.

[00:10:41] Richie Burke: At the end of that review so we know where to reach you And if you’ve already written one, we we do appreciate that just dm us on instagram and we’ll still enter you in the weekly drawing Thanks for all your support. Let’s get back to today’s episode with ian bennett How many years you think you got left in you?

[00:10:57] Richie Burke: So i’ve got a high level. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah It’s rare for a soccer player to So you’d be used to playing at the age you are, 

[00:11:04] Ian Bennett: right? Yes. And I mean, I think it’s, it’s not rare, but it’s like, if you’re an impact, right? Sometimes you’re a role player at that age, right? And thank God I’m not a role player yet.

[00:11:14] Ian Bennett: I’m still, still doing my thing. I’m still balling. So I think once that ends, I won’t, I don’t want to be a role player. If I can’t do the same stuff I was doing when I was like 26, then I’ll just retire. So we’ll see how it goes. Keep it going. Right. 

[00:11:29] Richie Burke: Keep it going. All right. Thank you. Are you ready for.

[00:11:32] Richie Burke: Standard five sponsored by central standard distillery five ish quick questions. I think we got about eight on the docket. Let’s go. 

[00:11:40] Ian Bennett: Let’s go ready. 

[00:11:41] Richie Burke: When it comes to professional soccer. What is your single greatest moment? 

[00:11:47] Ian Bennett: I think captain the side and winning the championship with Giuliano because I used to play with Jules and then he took over and then we could win a championship together.

[00:11:56] Ian Bennett: So that was kind of cool. So. We won one together and then we won another one while he was coaching and he gave me the captain’s band and I think that was awesome. Next 

[00:12:05] Richie Burke: question. Who gets more women? Soccer players or football 

[00:12:09] Ian Bennett: players? Oh my gosh, hands down soccer players all day. Have you seen Cristiano Ronaldo?

[00:12:14] Ian Bennett: Like, we got Cristiano Ronaldo. Who’s gonna beat him? No, soccer players, hands down. What 

[00:12:20] Richie Burke: about, what about soccer players or basketball players? 

[00:12:23] Ian Bennett: No, hands down because we have, so here’s the thing. Basketball players. They’re six, eight. Sometimes, sometimes girls don’t want that. Like, what are you guys going to do?

[00:12:30] Ian Bennett: Like, no. And then you can’t do stuff. You can’t fit in rides and stuff. No chance. Soccer players can do it all. Cause we do have some tall guys and we have some short guys and we have some fun size guys, but we can do it all. Like you, you can’t go 

[00:12:42] Richie Burke: on thing parts. More soccer players are MLB players.

[00:12:47] Richie Burke: Baseball. 

[00:12:47] Ian Bennett: Okay. So perfect. So it’s close almost, but they’re not fit. I’m sorry. They’re not in shape. Some of these guys just hit home runs and You could be 280, you could be whatever you want, so. You guys 

[00:12:58] Richie Burke: are in amazing shape. 

[00:12:59] Ian Bennett: That’s what I’m saying, we got it. We shave our legs, we glisten, we put baby oil everywhere.

[00:13:04] Ian Bennett: Whenever we can, we put baby oil everywhere. Are girls actually into that? I don’t know. I have no idea. That’s, that’s for them to figure out. I don’t know. I’m just telling you what you do. Or what I 

[00:13:13] Richie Burke: do. Michael Shepard, uh, SimGad, who’s wondering how you look, how you stay so young. Dang. 

[00:13:19] Ian Bennett: I mean, honestly, like I said, I drink a lot of water.

[00:13:23] Ian Bennett: I moisturize, um, good skin care. Um, get my sleep. Hey, sleep’s important. People like don’t sleep is a key and I try not to stress. Honestly, Rich, I don’t stress a lot. Like if something I never really get mad. Um, I just try to find solutions. Um, if someone kind of ticks me off or piss me off, I just. Won’t deal with them, but I’m pretty much I just try to stay happy as much as I can stay positive, too You know 

[00:13:50] Richie Burke: Next question who is the best looking Zimmerman brother?

[00:13:57] Ian Bennett: Dude, you want me, you want me to get released, man? Oh my 

[00:14:00] Richie Burke: gosh. You, you might, you might, depending on your answer, one, one, one in particular could be a 

[00:14:06] Ian Bennett: little upset. No, I think, I think honestly, like everything, like you got Joe, he’s kind of the funny guy, more outgoing, but I, it’s gotta be Mike. Mike’s got, Mike’s got the looks, he’s got the brains, he’s got the business savvy, he’s got, he’s got some charisma, he’s got it, I think, it’s gotta be Mike.

[00:14:23] Richie Burke: What is the most Canadian thing 

[00:14:24] Ian Bennett: about you? Oh my gosh, that’s easy. I’m obsessed with maple syrup. I will eat, like, I don’t want, I don’t want the stereotypes like Buddy the Elf and all that stuff, but I would literally, like, I would literally destroy syrup and I’ll put it on anything. Um, like everything. I love maple syrup.

[00:14:41] Ian Bennett: Like, dude, it’s, I can take a, I can take a bath in it and just lick it and eat. I love it. I’m obsessed. Would you put 

[00:14:48] Richie Burke: it on McDonald’s fries? I would, 

[00:14:50] Ian Bennett: honestly, I haven’t done that yet, but I would. Um, I You’re a big 

[00:14:52] Richie Burke: McDonald’s guy, right? 

[00:14:54] Ian Bennett: How do you know okay, so we’re supposed to keep I mean the kids are watching maybe kids are not 

[00:14:57] watching 

[00:14:58] Richie Burke: But yeah, you’re already told them what the way of players do 

[00:15:00] Ian Bennett: after I know but like I just don’t want my secrets Oh, so I love 

[00:15:04] Richie Burke: I love how McDonald’s is worse than RWB and Joe catch for the kids 

[00:15:10] Ian Bennett: McDonald’s is I’m not trying to promote McDonald’s cuz they don’t sponsor me anyways, but I’m loving it Like I love McDonald’s right?

[00:15:17] Ian Bennett: Like I’m it’s like my guilty like pleasure. I don’t know what it is, man I don’t know what it is I try not to eat it a lot, but that’s 

[00:15:25] Richie Burke: my go-To who? Who is more friendly? Canadians or Midwesterners? 

[00:15:30] Ian Bennett: Oh my gosh. Canadians. Hands down Canadians reallys all day 

[00:15:33] Richie Burke: young. If you, what if you exclude the greater Chicago area?

[00:15:38] Richie Burke: Totally. Because they can kind, they can be 

[00:15:40] Ian Bennett: dicks Canadians. ’cause like sometimes when, like, even when I’m in here, like in the, like in Wisconsin, like if it’s cold, like that brings kind of the attitude down. Like it’s cold in Canada when it’s cold. It’s just part of it. We’re just like, Hey, it’s part of life.

[00:15:54] Ian Bennett: You know, we warm up our cars the same way. It’s like, it’s different, but like in the summer when you guys are happy and you get the sun, you guys are really, really nice people, but I mean, Canadians just all around any season we’re, we’re pretty cool. You know, we don’t. 

[00:16:07] Richie Burke: What, uh, what keeps you so motivated and going all the 

[00:16:11] Ian Bennett: time?

[00:16:11] Ian Bennett: I love life, man. I love meeting good people. I mean, like, obviously, like, I met you and, like, it’s kind of crazy. We, even if we’re not talking every day, we kind of stay in touch and stuff. And you still, like, that’s what I love about life. And, and, and that’s probably why I stayed, I’ve stayed in Wisconsin so long.

[00:16:26] Ian Bennett: Because I met some really, really good people. Kind of like just back home in Canada. Like, it’s just, anything happens. If I need my car fixed, I know a guy. I need to go to the dentist. I know a good, like, it’s just, it’s a lot of good people that I’ve met over the time, and it feels like home. Like, it’s obviously, it’s my home now, but it’s, it’s, it’s like my second home, and I love it, man.

[00:16:45] Ian Bennett: I wouldn’t change it for, for anything. I could have played in Florida. I could have played in some, maybe some better areas and nicer climate, but I love Wisconsin, man. It’s home, man. 

[00:16:55] Richie Burke: Thanks for coming on today. It’s great seeing you. Dude. Thanks for having me, man. Appreciate you. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Milwaukee Uncut.

[00:17:02] Richie Burke: Just a reminder, if you have not already, please subscribe and review the podcast and leave your email or Instagram handle at the end of that review and you’ll automatically be entered in our weekly drawing for a new limited edition Milwaukee Uncut hat by AKA Custom Lids and a Central Standard gift card.

[00:17:18] Richie Burke: This podcast is in partnership with Nicolet Law, Central Standard and On Milwaukee. And produced right in the heart of Walker’s Point by Story Mark Studios.

Dating in Milwaukee Valentines Edition

Dating in Milwaukee Valentines Edition

Not sure what to do on Valentine’s Day in Milwaukee? From gifts to dinner spots to where to go out to we’ve got recommendations. Chef Adam Pawlak joins Grace, Danika and Richie. 

Not sure what to do on Valentine’s Day in Milwaukee? From gifts to dinner spots to where to go out to we’ve got recommendations.

Maybe you’re single like and looking for that perfect opening line or pick up strategy at the bars like Joe Villmow, we cover that.

Want to hear a story about a man who drove 18 hours up from Florida to meet a woman in Milwaukee then went dark and came back that has nothing to do with Valentine’s, we cover that as well.

No matter what you are looking for this Valentine’s season we’ve got something for you on this episode.

Chef Adam Pawlak joins Grace, Danika and Richie.

Milwaukee Uncut is produced in the heart of Walker’s Point by Story Mark Studios: https://storymarkstudios.com/

In Partnership with:

Central Standard Distillery,  Nicolet Law and OnMilwaukee

 


Transcript

Grace Scalzo: I have gone on two dates in one day and it was on a Valentine’s Day.

Chef Adam Pawlak: Let’s go. Jesus.

Grace Scalzo: Okay, I’m never expecting a gift. Gifts are always just like, wow. You know what’s coming though, come on. I mean, if I didn’t have at least flowers, I’d be mad.

Chef Adam Pawlak: Maybe I need to go to the Harp to buy shots. Bombs. If they chew with their mouth open, we’re done here.

Grace Scalzo: I think that would be like red flag, right?

Richie Burke: Hey everyone, it’s your host Richie Burke and welcome back to Milwaukee Uncut Dating in Milwaukee Valentine’s Day edition. If you’re listening to this after valentine’s don’t worry We’ve still got some great stories and advice But if you are scrambling last minute wondering what to do for that special someone or maybe that special several people In your life, we’ve got some exceptional content coming your way or if you’re single Looking for that perfect valentine’s day opener out at the bars like our friends joe vilmo and ben anderson.

We go through that Or maybe you just want to hear some good stories like a story about a man who drove 19 hours up from Florida to Milwaukee to meet up with a girl, then went dark, then came back. What happened? This story really has nothing to do with Valentine’s, but was submitted to us and we hit, we had to cover it.

So no matter where you’re at in life, this is an episode you’re not gonna want to miss. On that note, let’s dive in to dating in Milwaukee. Valentine’s Day edition presented by Central Standard Distillery. Nicolet Law and in partnership with our friends over at On Milwaukee. Back by popular demand, we are here with Dating in Milwaukee, Valentine’s edition.

Back with me, I’ve got Danika Holt, former Miss Wisconsin USA. Danika, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks. Everything that has to do with Marquette basketball, yoga instructor at multiple places. Young and single bringing that perspective to the show. She’s on the market grace calls a welcome back. Good to see you

Grace Scalzo: Thank you.

Thanks for that introduction. That was great

Richie Burke: And this podcast is sponsored by central standard distillery I’m currently grace and I are currently drinking some door County cherry vodka and Gatorade Which is actually pretty good in my opinion grace. How is your drink after pouring? Some door county cherry vodka into your gatorade bottle.

Grace Scalzo: I would say it only made the taste better. So yes loving it

Richie Burke: As am I and some news we have a new sponsor as well Nicole law fear the beard and to go along with that. We have a special guest Someone whose beard rivals the Nicolet beard. That’s right. Chef. Adam Pawlak. Welcome to the podcast.

Chef Adam Pawlak: Hello sir.

Thanks for having me.

Richie Burke: , what are you doing here on a day? Dating in Milwaukee podcast? I don’t

Chef Adam Pawlak: know. You just hit me up and we’re just gonna let it rip here. . It’ll be fun though. It’s like good. It’s good. Did hit

Richie Burke: you up or did you hit me up? Or did Eric Kennedy hit, did Eric Kennedy hit both of us up and then you.

begrudgingly volunteered to come on and I was like, sure.

Chef Adam Pawlak: No, I love coming on here with you and this is a good perspective. This is someone that really doesn’t date all that much, so.

Richie Burke: But is single.

Chef Adam Pawlak: Yes.

Richie Burke: And can cook and is very active on the Milwaukee restaurant scene. So you can give a lot of good advice to the listeners today.

Chef Adam Pawlak: I can, yes. Perfect,

Richie Burke: thanks for coming on.

Chef Adam Pawlak: I’m ready for you, man.

Richie Burke: Okay, great. , first topic. Do you guys think people should make a big deal out of Valentine’s or do you think it is a completely overblown Hallmark holiday?

Danika Holt: , I kind of feel like it’s, it’s nice. Cause it reminds you to like celebrate each other or go on a date.

But I also feel like it’s totally one of those kind of overrated holidays. I never, never was dating anyone on Valentine’s day. I would, there was always sick or. A boyfriend and I broke up, so I never had good luck with Valentine’s day. So that’s maybe where my perspective comes from.

Richie Burke: Was there one occasion?

Danika Holt: Okay. Okay. We have to go back. I take back my last comment on the last episode. I have gone on two dates in one day and it was on a Valentine’s day. One was like a friend. One was like, I don’t know.

Chef Adam Pawlak: You got lunch and dinner covered.

Richie Burke: To add context, we did bring up someone on the last episode who went on three dates in one day, including one at the harp.

Jesus, that’s pretty good. Grace’s favorite spot and where she was you guys from last time. It was

Grace Scalzo: definitely not me like you I don’t do much dating, but I did go to the harp recently and they were very nice and it gave me free drinks because We talked about them

Richie Burke: your new sponsor the heart.

Grace Scalzo: So we love the heart.

Richie Burke: They’re not I am I am a fan of the harp after the last episode though. I went to the bucks game. I think it was that that night. And it went to the harp after with brandon chalker Bomb Knight Brando and, , Ben Jewish from Coakley Brothers, need to give him a shout out just to try out the, the bomb strategy we were talking about.

Not that any of us were on the market or anything, just doing a little market research over at the Harp. And I mean, if you’re a guy and you want to engage a group of girls, just buy a tray of bombs and bring them over at the Harp.

Danika Holt: He said it worked, right?

Richie Burke: Yeah. And I tested it out or witnessed people testing it out.

I was just along for the ride doing research. It’s gotta work. Free drinks. It was a business decision. , but yeah. Okay, wait. So Danica, how’d your two dates on Valentine’s Day go?

Danika Holt: You know, I honestly had to call my mom before this because I prefer to block all bad memories out of my head and usually Valentine’s was a bad memory.

So she had to rejog it. And, , Yeah, not memorable, I can tell you that much.

Grace Scalzo: Okay, look, ladies, gentlemen, I think you deserve to be celebrated. , if you are with someone, if you’re dating someone, Casually, not casually. I think, celebrate it. This is coming from someone who, my mom, I have a stepdad, she remarried.

He doesn’t even know what Valentine’s Day is, okay? So we gotta set the standard a little bit higher. We need to start celebrating these things. That’s why they happen, right? So I got my pink on today. If you’re with someone on Valentine’s Day, unlike me, , I need you to celebrate that in honor of the single ladies, okay?

That’s my two cents on that. I

Richie Burke: like that. And we have two weeks.

Chef Adam Pawlak: Don’t they have a day for that? Isn’t there a day for that, right? That they like celebrate single valentine. Oh, yes. There it is.

Richie Burke: Don’t don’t throw in the towel yet I feel like that’s more

Chef Adam Pawlak: special to people than the actual valentine’s day see more stuff about that Than what people are doing on valentine’s day.

Richie Burke: I know , I know grace’s mom carmen. Yes. I mean she she Has to go crazy not having Valentine’s Day celebrated. I feel like she’d be all for that kind of thing.

Grace Scalzo: Sometimes she does force it You know, but we’re not trying to force it. We need Sean to step up his game Sean if you’re listening my stepdad, this is a call out to you.

Take my mom out to dinner Show her a good time at dinner. Okay, we we need to step it up Carmen’s

Richie Burke: the best story mark studios will send her a valentine Carmen is a client over at johnson financial group not a sponsor of the show but a story mark client and we You Love everyone over there. , any, any, , chef, do you have a, a awkward Valentine’s experience that you would like to share on the podcast?

Chef Adam Pawlak: Well, I was telling them that my Valentine’s day is like in a restaurant, but like the last few years I haven’t had to be in the restaurant or whatever, but usually that’s the biggest night of the year for us in the industry. , for me, for Valentine’s day, I don’t know. I feel like the times that I’ve celebrated, it’s been like a couple of days before after, but it’s not very often.

And I say, go for it. I guess. I think it’s worse if you’re buying like the stuff from Walgreens and Target and stuff like go outside of that. I feel like we can’t just have like pink and red heart shaped, like stuff like that, like, or candies that are clearly bought in the Walgreens aisle. I don’t know. I would, I would be a little bit different.

That doesn’t even have to do with, , cooking or what I know, but I feel like if I got like a Valentine card that was all decked out like that, I’d be like, you pick this up on the way here.

Richie Burke: You know, Danica and Grace, I’d love to give the floor to you. What kind of, , gift would you be expecting on Valentines and at what point in the relationship too?

Grace Scalzo: Okay, I’m never expecting a gift. Gifts are always just like, wow. You know what’s coming though, come on. I mean, if I didn’t have at least flowers, I’d be mad. I don’t know if I’d be mad. I think time. Nothing can beat the time. Hey, I’m gonna come over at the very least like it should be like you making an effort or whoever I would be with You’re making the effort to spend it with each other besides that like that’s a gift your presence is a gift Remember that people but yeah flowers with rice too.

I mean, I feel like you

Danika Holt: guys need to do more. Okay I was gonna say you

Chef Adam Pawlak: open the doors like So I’m

Danika Holt: here. I’m

Chef Adam Pawlak: wearing a red shirt, just wearing a red t shirt ready for the night.

Danika Holt: , well, I had one Valentine’s where I woke up and my neck was out severely. I like literally couldn’t even get out of bed and I had to call the doctor and I was on muscle relaxers all day, horrible day.

But the guy that I was like casually seeing at the time, like dropped off, like all this stuff at my door didn’t even come in. He just dropped everything off. Like that’s super sweet. , I feel like Why didn’t he

Chef Adam Pawlak: come in? He just left it?

Danika Holt: It was like before he had to go to work.

Chef Adam Pawlak: Oh God, okay. I was gonna say, he’s like, I’m not coming in there, but your stuff’s right here.

Danika Holt: Yeah, no, that was before work. , but I feel like, yeah, I guess not expecting anything, but the least a guy could do is some flowers, a bottle of wine, something like that.

Richie Burke: At what point, if you’re like casually seeing someone, is it, do you, if they give you a Valentine’s Day gift or ask you out on Valentine’s, let’s see if you’re kind of seeing someone for a few weeks, is that a big deal?

Is it? Like some people are in that situation.

Grace Scalzo: I think it depends if you are really into that person because valentine’s day like the chef was talking about before we started here It’s kind of like a thing like everybody steps out on valentine’s day So if you don’t want to be seen in public with this person, you’re casually talking to Valentine’s day I would say but if you are like, we’re actually dating like people can know that’s okay Go to dinner do something.

Nice. That’s my

Richie Burke: It’s it sends a message That you’re maybe a little more than then Just casually seeing each other if you ask them to do something on Valentine’s.

Danika Holt: I feel like it’s like a cloudy situation. A few weeks in is a little stressful, but I feel like you could at least like

Chef Adam Pawlak: Get takeout. Here’s,

Danika Holt: here’s a Starbucks gift card.

Like, I don’t know, just do something cute. Like that’s just like thoughtful and nice, but it doesn’t have to like go beyond that next step of like romantic.

Chef Adam Pawlak: You just get takeout and then you don’t have to be seen with them and be like, I’d rather be here with you. Yeah. But really you’re just hiding them.

That’s what she said. I mean, I think going out on Valentine’s Day would be fine even if it was a couple weeks because it’s just like, hey, someone’s cooking for us and we’re just, you know, it’s a night out.

Richie Burke: , any, any advice for those who are single and maybe feeling a little down that they’re not with someone on Valentine’s Day?

Danika Holt: Like that’s when you do a Galentines. Yeah, is there a male version of

Grace Scalzo: that?

Richie Burke: That’s when you go to the harp

Grace Scalzo: Okay, this is my Valentine’s Day plan Tentatively speaking as the single sad one here. I don’t know what your experience is. But for me I know these two are taken. I’m single. I will be going to Moe’s Steakhouse with two of my cousins.

They’re both girls I’m very excited. We’re having our Galentines on Valentine’s so that’s why I’m spreading it. Staking it to the

Chef Adam Pawlak: man. Not even the day after.

Grace Scalzo: Yep.

Chef Adam Pawlak: Did you just say staking it to the man? Staking it to the man. I thought you did too. That’d be good too.

Richie Burke: Staking it to the man. I just ended up me asking that out because that was a very brilliant pun that you just pulled.

Well then yes,

Chef Adam Pawlak: yes. Then yes, it was that I think you did say that she said we don’t need a guy to buy a steak We’re gonna buy our own steak Yep

Richie Burke: All right. So chef, let’s let’s Move it over to you. You’re the the guest on today’s podcast the celebrity guest over there Hell’s kitchen been on multiple times.

Current relationship status single

Chef Adam Pawlak: single. Yep Pretty clearly. I’m just floating in my own cloud right now with no one, , no one on that list or no one, no perspectives right now. So, that’s kind of what that’s like. I feel like some people will always be talking to someone no matter what. , not if they’re taken, but they’re just like, oh yeah, they’re friends or whatever, but.

I don’t know. There’s some people out there that talk to like seven or eight people at the same time and I don’t know how that’s even possible, but

Richie Burke: Was that you in December?

Chef Adam Pawlak: Not me in December. No, not at all. I just, like I said, there’s people out there that I may know or may not know that hold on to a few different options, I guess.

Richie Burke: Would you put Eric Kennedy in that category right now?

Chef Adam Pawlak: Just putting me on the spot. I don’t know about Eric. I think he’s straight up. I think Eric, if he likes a girl, he just goes all out. And then if that doesn’t work on to the next one, I don’t think he’s dabbling with multiple different girls.

Richie Burke: Eligible bachelor, Colin Yelich, who you were playing video games with before.

Chef Adam Pawlak: That’s right. , No, I mean, he is a, well, he’s an out of towner, so he doesn’t know everyone. So if there’s a girl out there that doesn’t want a guy that’s been hanging out with every girl in Milwaukee, Colin Yelich, he just got here three years ago. So he’s still new, but I don’t know. We go out a lot and there’s, there’s so many nights where there’s no interaction with just like trying to hit on girls.

We just go out and have fun. And if it, if something comes up, I mean, it’s pretty difficult in this, , in the city to just like. Have girls rolling up to you. And like you said, though, maybe I need to go to the harp and buy shots.

Richie Burke: Bombs.

Chef Adam Pawlak: Oh, sorry. Bombs. Yes. Shots are too intimidating. Shots of tequila.

Richie Burke: I mean, when you’re out with Yelich and Holbrook and that crew, you just don’t have a group coming up to you left and right.

I mean, does it get any better than that? They’re good looking guys. Yeah,

Chef Adam Pawlak: they’re good looking guys. , but I don’t know. It’s like Holbrook’s married. Colin acts like he’s married to no one. He’s just always trying to get home after dinner, you know. He’s not very active out there. And, , for me, you know, I’m with a lot of people that are taken, so I think that also hinders stuff.

I don’t have a lot of good wingmen out there. Alright. Cause they just don’t care.

Richie Burke: Alright. Any , single guys who are getting after it out there? Chef Adam needs some new friends cause Colin and Eric and Holbrook are clearly not getting it done for him. Not getting the job done. What, what, you’re, you’re a chef, you’re very active on the scene, what are the best Valentine’s Day restaurants in Milwaukee?

Do you have, do you have a top five?

Chef Adam Pawlak: Sure. I mean, I would, I would consider these like date spots, maybe not just Valentine’s, but If you don’t have your reservation for valentine’s day like now or yesterday Good luck with that or come to egg and flour

Richie Burke: Bre and I ate at 4 p. m. Last year.

Chef Adam Pawlak: Yeah, exactly. That’s all they have, right?

Yeah, like it’s like new year’s eve when people are out at 3 30 having dinner all dressed up But some some on my list I would say La Dama I’m going there tonight, but that’s like a little chill spot It’s the old crazy water right on second Street your neighbor from here, sir It’s like across the street from it’s like a block over from tin widow Little kitchen used to be crazy water,

Richie Burke: but let’s check that out. I’ve been eating Sweetgreen and chipotle

Chef Adam Pawlak: Yeah, so La Dama, , cool little area, little space, really great drinks, higher end Mexican food I would say. , Santino’s in Bayview, if you haven’t been there, that’s a good spot, pizza and like Italian style. I like

Richie Burke: that spot by Enlightened Brewing, good spot as well. Super

Chef Adam Pawlak: old school. And just because something’s expensive, don’t think that it’s because Valentine’s Day.

Like, give an expensive gift and a more relaxed dinner and maybe that’ll be better. , egg and flour, cause we don’t take reservations. So you can just roll right in. You don’t have to be dressed up to do that. , if you want to do the high end stuff, always carnivore, you know, that’s the, the good go to spot or, , One spot I really do like that I have done a date, I have Story Hill BKC.

Really good spot to go. It’s chill. There’s a lot of menu items, but some adventurous stuff. So I like when I go out with someone that I don’t really know, I like to see like what they order and how they eat. Not literally how they eat, like physically, but like how they order and what kind of stuff they want.

I’m not staring at that meat. Yes! If they chew with their mouth open, we’re done here. See, she knows, right? But that’s a big tell, right? When you go out to eat with someone and see what they’re, what they order, what they like, or you order something and they’re like, no, I’m good on that. It all depends. It’s different for me though.

Richie Burke: Yeah. Danica, any, any favorite date spots for you in the city?

Danika Holt: In the city for dinner.

Richie Burke: Yeah

Danika Holt: or anything.

Chef Adam Pawlak: Well, she goes on two dates on valentine. So maybe once

Danika Holt: Let’s clear the stage clear there i’m a different person. All right , I don’t know Can you come back to me? What’s something cool

Chef Adam Pawlak: you guys would go to that’s not just dinner that you think would be like special

Grace Scalzo: Okay, wait, first I have to say Tanuta’s in Bayview because my mom’s a Tanuta, so Tanuta’s go.

, alright, wait, something special that’s not dinner, you said?

Chef Adam Pawlak: Yeah, like what’s something you’d be acceptable with having a guy do that’s not dinner on Valentine’s Day?

Danika Holt: I always think it’s fun to like, plan to make a dinner. Yeah. Like, something different, like roll sushi, or like,

Chef Adam Pawlak: Make pasta. Yeah,

Danika Holt: but like from scratch or something.

Yep,

Chef Adam Pawlak: of course

Danika Holt: But

Chef Adam Pawlak: you have to be with them for a while, right? That’s not yeah, I guess it’s a little bit more than three week

Danika Holt: Yeah, yeah

Chef Adam Pawlak: relationship having them come over and do that But

Danika Holt: but having like some activity I think is good because you’re like distracted a little bit You don’t have to have full conversation the entire time

Grace Scalzo: Yeah, but what that making dinner?

No, let’s turn it back to you then. Oh, what are we? What are we making? What what should we make?

Chef Adam Pawlak: If it was

Richie Burke: someone not of your skill level,

Chef Adam Pawlak: no, of course Oh, so you want you’re not saying like what I would make for son. You’re saying like what people should make

Richie Burke: Yeah, if a guy’s trying to impress his girlfriend, well, I do know that

Chef Adam Pawlak: all girls are cool with pasta So like make a really good sauce and like take your time on that and then just use box pasta It doesn’t have to be fresh or go get like Whole foods are selling, they have like the fresh pasta.

It’s very easy nowadays to make it good. But pasta and like a salad, whip that together. That should be good. And then buy your dessert. We know that. It’s not like you have to, to bake or anything. , or I would say give a, give a shot at a steak if they’re down for that. You know, like a little filet and pan sear it.

I think every guy out there can make a steak in some, Vegetables, right? I mean, I don’t know. Is that

Richie Burke: just a pan on the oven? Asking for those listeners. Pan on the

Chef Adam Pawlak: stove, cast iron, little oil, get it hot. Sear it, finish in the oven.

Richie Burke: I’ll teach you. What about an air fryer? Does that pass? You wanna know,

Chef Adam Pawlak: I’ve never used an air fryer.

So I don’t even, when people ask me, does this go in the air fryer? I don’t know. I don’t even know what it is. It’s all about the deep fry, Richie.

Richie Burke: Okay, sounds, sounds good. We’ll talk, oh, oh, he’s looking for tips for yourself. Sorry, yes. , Grace, any, any favorite date spots for you? ,

Grace Scalzo: mention Tanuta’s, but I’m a big sushi girl.

I have to switch it up completely, but love anywhere that sushi is, I’ll be there. , yeah.

Richie Burke: Have you been to Screaming Tuna?

Grace Scalzo: I’ve been to Screaming Tuna. I’ve been to, , the one in Bayview. What’s it called? Hungry So?

Mm hmm

Cowa. It’s simple. It’s in 3rd Street Market Or a standalone as well. But yeah,

Richie Burke: let’s get into some fan submitted questions right here Joe Vilmo Going going out to the bars on Valentine’s Day Do you have a better chance with women opposed to on a normal night?

I think Joe Vilmo might be wondering if his odds are going up if women are more Desperate if they are out and single on Valentine’s Day.

Danika Holt: Well, I feel like with the big Galentine’s movement. It might be the play True didn’t

Grace Scalzo: even think of that. Yeah, I feel like if she’s out on Valentine’s Day This is my thing with all guys though.

No matter what the day is Approach the girl. Like, if you’re, if you think that she’s cute, whatever, shoot your shot. There’s no time to waste here, okay? Like, don’t message someone after and be like, I think I saw you. No, no, no. Go up to them, even if it’s not Valentine’s Day. That’s the play. That’s the move.

Richie Burke: What do you think of Chef Adam and his friends just keeping away from people and trying to wait for them to come up, come up to them?

Chef Adam Pawlak: Hey, I would, I’ll let you answer, then I will rebuttal that, Richie.

Grace Scalzo: I think it takes a certain type of confidence for the woman to approach the guy. Not to say I would never do it, but I think a lot of girls anticipate the guy doing it.

So, I don’t know if your standoffish play is gonna, you know, reap some benefits for you. You might want to start changing that. That might

Chef Adam Pawlak: be the problem.

Richie Burke: Let’s go, let’s go to a listener submitted story. This one is pretty crazy. , non Valentine’s Day related, but dating in Milwaukee related here, okay? Met a guy on Instagram who was from here but was currently living in Florida.

We were talking for two weeks and he finally drove 19 hours to come take me on multiple dates over his time here. He was totally love bombing me, telling me I’m the one and talking about our future together. After he left, we booked my flight to Florida, and then he got weird, and I didn’t hear from him for days.

Then he said we had to cancel my flight because there was a shooting at his apartment building, and he was moving. He totally ghosted me, and then weeks later, he sends me the longest paragraph apology text. Parentheses totally written by Chad GPT. Ends up moving back here. And would try and make plans with me And every time he made plans he would come up with the craziest excuses.

I have ever heard when I finally blocked him He found a way to send me a link to the drake song texts go green To shorten it into a topic discuss how to avoid being love bombed or ghosted. It’s happened to me many times

Danika Holt: Was he married? In florida

Richie Burke: That could be a thing. I mean if you’re driving 19 hours to get away, and then you book a flight It’s like my first

Grace Scalzo: initial thought.

Richie Burke: Don’t let her come down.

Grace Scalzo: I was gonna say I think that everybody’s very great like everybody listening to this you are amazing But someone’s gonna drive 19 hours for you or for me or for anyone like I think that would be like red flag, right?

Richie Burke: Yeah after Two weeks if you can’t find anyone in your entire state and you’re driving 19 hours to Wisconsin That’s probably a red flag

Danika Holt: Yeah

Chef Adam Pawlak: I’m almost speechless.

I wouldn’t even know. I wouldn’t even allow that. You’ve been very talkative so far. I’m just letting them get their insight in. But for me, I can, I don’t care if I hurt the guy pool out there. But if you’re a girl, it’s very simple. Just wait, wait it out as long as possible before giving in to any like, Bedroom time or anything.

And that is literally the test. Just wait it out. And if they stay around without that, you’re good. But if you give in, you’re on your fucking own at that point. I’m sorry for swearing, but you’re on your own. That is your fault. Wait it out. I’m telling you.

Danika Holt: I also just feel like when it’s like hot and heavy right away.

Usually burns really fast.

Chef Adam Pawlak: Oh, yes. Absolutely.

Danika Holt: So just being aware of that

Chef Adam Pawlak: I just don’t give it i’m like do real dates Don’t just like text and message but hang out a lot and stuff, but just be like i’m gonna go home It’s good to see i’ve only known you for three weeks. Why do like Just keep letting it go and if they don’t like that or whatever then you know that.

They’re not the one and if they wait and they’re still around then you know that you’re good I mean, it’s almost like , it’s so easy. I mean,

Richie Burke: well, I think with with ghosting too. Yeah, if you If you meet a guy or girl that first night the probability of them ghosting is up significantly opposed to if you actually went on like Several dates and didn’t hook up with them right away or know something about

Chef Adam Pawlak: them Like maybe their last name or something not just their instagram handle it’s like Just let it ride.

Try to do real life things. Don’t try to do like three amazing, crazy dates as your first three dates. Like do normal stuff.

Grace Scalzo: Yeah.

Chef Adam Pawlak: And then just wait and wait. I mean,

Grace Scalzo: Okay. I couldn’t agree more with him. And it’s sad.

Danika Holt: Cause these guys are going to hate me.

Chef Adam Pawlak: They are going to hate me.

Danika Holt: I also feel like this is taking a different spin on it, but I’ve had friends who they just like want the guy to be so into them.

And it’s like, pretty obvious from an outsider’s perspective, like, if he’s not, like, texting you often, trying to do things with you, like, Maybe he’s just not that into you and then like get over it. He’s rolling on the

Chef Adam Pawlak: bench. That’s what it is.

Danika Holt: Yeah

Richie Burke: Yeah, for sure. And if he’s only coming over when it’s convenient.

Yeah, or or yeah If he’s not responding right away, or if she’s not responding right away, that’s like a sign that there’s yeah, we’re not all bad There’s girls out there that will

Chef Adam Pawlak: not text back in the back. Oh, yeah I’m here. I

Danika Holt: forgot about that. Exactly.

Chef Adam Pawlak: That’s not a thing. I

Danika Holt: read this earlier. That is not a thing

Richie Burke: Grace, you’re the youngest one here.

Is ghosting a prevalent thing right now? You guys, it’s so rough

Grace Scalzo: out here in these streets. No, I’m just kidding. I’m totally joking, but, , in in some like with some sincerity here, it is sad. It’s like. It’s very common. Ghosting is very common, especially on a campus. Options are everywhere. We see it on social media, but especially when you’re on like a concentrated couple blocks.

, guys think that they can do whatever. Girls think that everything, like, nothing’s gonna come out or that maybe they’re doing whatever. So yeah, ghosting’s common. , finding out later that, like, two people you didn’t even think knew each other have been hanging out when it’s convenient. Very late at night, etc.

Very common. This is all just like Like it’s, it’s a lot. So try then being young, trying to find someone that’s for real good luck. Like that’s where I’m at. So , if anybody has any advice, let me know. But yeah.

Richie Burke: Well I think the chef, the chef, what the chef said was kind kind of solid. Yeah. Within the taking it slow realm.

I mean, I think if you hook up right away, it’s kind of a crapshoot and the ghosting probability goes up significantly. This girl’s message, apparently they met on Instagram and the guy drove 19. Hours to Wisconsin, which, right, I would consider that a red flag if he couldn’t find anyone in his, his region or state.

Or just fly.

Speaker 8: Yeah.

Richie Burke: I have anxiety on airplanes. I can understand that, but, but yeah, I, I even suck it up and fly when it’s 19 hours. The thing that’s weird is anyway, he went all the way

Chef Adam Pawlak: there, they hung out, she said that they were doing stuff, but he didn’t have her come back, so.

Richie Burke: Well, no, he moved back up.

Chef Adam Pawlak: Oh yeah, he moved back, okay.

Richie Burke: And then sent her, , Drake’s song, Texaco Green. Yeah. Do you know what that song is? I don’t. I do not. Grace, you went to the Drake concert, right? I love

Grace Scalzo: Drake. , I’m not familiar with that one though, no.

Richie Burke: So sending a pretty obscure Drake song specifically about texts. This guy, I, I think she dodged a bullet.

A hundred percent. Yeah, you dodged. Thank you for submitting your story, and you, you dodged a bullet there.

Ben Anderson, star of the last viral video. What is the best pickup line when you’re out on Valentine’s Day? If a guy approaches you and you’re at the bar on Valentine’s Day, what would you like to hear? Ben Anderson, Collier’s International.

Chef Adam Pawlak: What a plug. I’m dying to know, cause I’m going to use whatever you guys say right now.

I’m writing this down. So better work. I’m reporting back.

Danika Holt: Well, you want to hear a good or a bad one first?

Richie Burke: I mean, Ben Anderson wants a good one, but if the bad one’s funny, you can, , you can go there and then bring it back around on a positive note.

Danika Holt: I heard one once that a guy came up and was like, are you wearing space pants?

Cause your ass is out of this world.

Chef Adam Pawlak: It’s a classic.

Danika Holt: So I would not recommend something cheesy or corny.

Richie Burke: What was your response to that?

Danika Holt: I would walk away. It’s so creepy and uncomfortable. Don’t

Richie Burke: do that. Ben Anderson. I’d be like, I would be like,

Danika Holt: your smile is infectious. Like I saw it from across the room or your eyes are so beautiful.

Or they

Chef Adam Pawlak: really like, see, that’s why I get worried about this. Because if you say that to like, Oh, I’ve heard this a thousand times. Great. I think the space pants was cool. He was obviously thinking about it. Don’t encourage people. Danica, what’s

Richie Burke: a good one? She said the eyes across the room.

Danika Holt: Smile or eyes.

Richie Burke: Wait for the eyes. Yeah. Just go, go say hi or something.

Grace Scalzo: See, I’m bad at receiving compliments, so for me, I’m just really, it would just be cool if someone was like, Hey, like, we’re both, we’re both here on Valentine’s Day. It’s kind of funny, right? Like, can I get you a drink? Do you want like

hor?

Grace Scalzo: Or like hor, but then also just, state the elephant in the room.

Why are we out on Valentine’s Day at this bar? Like, what’s going on? You know what would happen

Chef Adam Pawlak: to me if she says that? She’d be like, my boyfriend’s in the bathroom. I don’t know what you’re talking about. And they would just, I’d be like, okay, sorry, thank you. Sorry for bothering you.

Richie Burke: Chef, how’s your self confidence these days?

Chef Adam Pawlak: We’re good. We’re good. Alright. I mean, when I go out, like I said, I’m out to just have fun, and I’ll, I’ll talk to seven year old ladies, to my lowest, probably, not like that, but I’m saying I’m just out there, like. We did, we

Richie Burke: did do the half your age plus seven thing last time.

Chef Adam Pawlak: Yeah, . No, I, I’m, I’m all about it, but they have to be interesting people too.

I don’t want to go up to a girl and just buy a round of shots. So then be like three hours later, they’re just, everyone’s drunk. Like it sounds like a good time, but it never finished as well.

Richie Burke: Let’s say I, I was, , I was out one time on Valentine’s day night. And some girl handed me a valentine like a grade school valentine That’s

Danika Holt: cute That

Richie Burke: was an interesting strategy she probably did in her purse, yeah, maybe she had like 10 just ready What do what do you guys think of that?

If like ben anderson like bought a bunch of grade school valentines and was just making them rain at joe cats or something

Grace Scalzo: I kind of like it I like it, but then it kind of is unfortunate if you meet a good one because It can’t be customized, you don’t know their name Like, what’s the note inside? Is there your nber in there?

Richie Burke: , Give it a shot, let us know Ben. I like this play.

Grace Scalzo: Yeah, give it a shot, let us know.

Richie Burke: I like Ben Anderson getting some valentines and , maybe, or getting some bombs and maybe putting the valentines cards on the tray of bombs and walking up to the table with them. Yeah, I mean you can’t, as a girl you like can’t get mad at that.

Danika Holt: No, I would think it was like funny It’s a good conversation starter.

Chef Adam Pawlak: Like why do you have ten Valentine’s cards in your pocket ready to

Richie Burke: go? So that’s that’s a bulletproof going out on Valentine’s strategy. Yeah. Tray of bombs Plus Valentine’s with something funny written in them go up to a group of girls

Chef Adam Pawlak: You’re pretty much walking into the club with a Party City bag just ready to go.

Like, what’s in there, sir? That’s all the things I need to hit on a girl tonight.

Grace Scalzo: I’m feeling hopeless. I don’t know.

Richie Burke: Grace, how can we make you feel more hopeful? Grace, the next time you see a guy out, here, you ready? The next

Chef Adam Pawlak: time you see a guy out, and you would even remotely be okay with going out in public with him to a restaurant, just go up to him and start talking to him. Do you think Grace needs to do that? She’s a good catcher over here.

I know, but the only people, you got to remember that the people that Are guys too

Richie Burke: nervous out

Chef Adam Pawlak: there to make a move? Well, think about this. If a guy is okay with going up to a girl and like saying something or hitting on her or whatever, just think about how many times he’s done that.

Speaker 8: The guys that

Chef Adam Pawlak: aren’t hitting on the girls are probably really good guys and they’re like, there’s no way in hell that I can go up to that girl or she’s gonna think anything.

And Some of the guys that I know that have had girls hit on them, they’re still with them, like, years later.

Danika Holt: I mean, I will say I hit on my husband in Martini.

Chef Adam Pawlak: At the grocery store. There we go! This is perfect proof. Then you can pick exactly which one. Let’s end this on

Richie Burke: an uplifting note. Danica, why don’t you tell the audience how you met your husband?

Danika Holt: It was at Fresh Time. Fresh Time. , by the North End. And I saw him walking in and I was like, Oh, he’s kind of cute. Was not going to the grocery store that day. Walked in.

Chef Adam Pawlak: She’s like, I got to go.

Danika Holt: Yeah. Walked in kind of like, you know, casually followed him around the store. This is a

Chef Adam Pawlak: one in a million story.

I’m sorry.

Speaker 8: Yeah,

Chef Adam Pawlak: when I go to grocery stores, there’s just people putzing around, like grabbing stuff.

Richie Burke: Miss Wisconsin didn’t roll up to you?

Grace Scalzo: I look my worst at the store, but let’s just grab some random stuff. Let’s just

Richie Burke: knock it off. Danica, you were following a guy around a store. Current Miss Wisconsin following a guy around a grocery store.

Danika Holt: And that was it. I gave him something in my purse to watch Miss USA.

Chef Adam Pawlak: But did you say something to him first? No.

Danika Holt: Yeah,

Chef Adam Pawlak: I just want to know if she initiated it.

Danika Holt: Yeah, I was behind him in the check online gave him like this Miss usa like watch thing because I didn’t know what else to do And then we like left.

I don’t even know if I said my name And I was gone for like three weeks. He found me on facebook , like messaged me a couple times and then three weeks later. We came back had coffee and that was it That’s so nice. Yeah So there’s hope there is but it’s like when you’re least expecting it So Just, yeah.

Chef Adam Pawlak: I’m gonna hit up Fresh Time all the time.

Danika Holt: Maybe, yeah, maybe we need to go to grocery stores, not bars.

Richie Burke: Yeah, maybe we should stop shouting out The Harp and Joe Katz and Red White and Blue and give Fresh Time a nice, See, that’s the problem. Whole Foods, you know.

Grace Scalzo: The problem is, before I even came on this podcast, I wasn’t frequenting those.

I was frequenting Fresh Time, and now I’m just like, trying to figure it out. So, we’ll go back to grocery stores, that’s what I’m getting from this.

Richie Burke: Well, , I don’t, I don’t know if, People got a lot. I think we I think we got some tips out of this from a cooking standpoint from places to go standpoint So, , thank you all for coming on today

Grace Scalzo: Thank you.

Richie Burke: Thank you. Thanks for dropping in good seeing you in your nice beard Thank you, sir, and grace for coming back looking great in your pink sweater over there.

Grace Scalzo: Happy Valentine’s Day everybody

Richie Burke: By the time this airs, there’s still like five days till Valentine’s Day Grace, what’s your Instagram handle? You want to shout that out?

I know it’ll be in the videos.

Grace Scalzo: At GraceGelso, just my name.

Richie Burke: Alright, you know where, you know where to go.

Grace Scalzo: Yeah.

Richie Burke: Do not DM do it. But anyways.

Chef Adam Pawlak: And you can hit up my Instagram DM whenever you want. Thanks for the shout out, Richie. And

Richie Burke: you

Chef Adam Pawlak: can

Richie Burke: go

Chef Adam Pawlak: eat

Richie Burke: at Egg and Flour

Chef Adam Pawlak: whenever you want.

Danika Holt: And dinner ideas. I need dinner ideas for Valentine’s.

Chef Adam Pawlak: Oh yeah. Dinner ideas. Yes. You can DM and ask for dinner ideas.

Richie Burke: Thank you for tuning into Milwaukee Uncut Valentine’s Day edition, write a review and subscribe on Apple podcast.

We’ll be picking a winner each week to send a limited run Milwaukee Uncut hat to and if you don’t want a hat We’ll send the winner a gift card So just make sure to leave a review on Apple and subscribe if you have not already that helps out the show and we will be picking one winner Every single week, just leave your email or Instagram handle on the back end of that review.

So we know where to find you. Also a reminder that this episode is presented by Central Standard Distillery and Nicolet Law Offices in a partnership with OnMilwaukee.

Grace Weber: Grammy Award Winner

Grace Weber: Grammy Award Winner

Grace Weber’s journey in the music industry has been an amazing ride. From her appearance on Oprah in college to collaborating with Chance the Rapper and winning a Grammy with him and Kanye to signing with Capitol Records.

Grace Weber’s journey in the music industry has been an amazing ride. From her appearance on Oprah in college to collaborating with Chance the Rapper and winning a Grammy with him and Kanye to signing with (and parting ways with) Capitol Records. And now, with the release of her new album “Paper Flower,” Grace  continues to evolve and make waves in the industry. We also talk mental health and go behind the scenes of the music industry.  We cover it all and more on this episode of Milwaukee Uncut that you won’t want to miss.

Milwaukee Uncut is produced in the heart of Walker’s Point by Story Mark Studios: https://storymarkstudios.com/

In Partnership with

Nicolet Law: https://nicoletlaw.com/

Central Standard Distillery: https://thecentralstandard.com/

OnMilwaukee: https://onmilwaukee.com/


Transcript

Grace Weber: I got surprised by an Oprah camera crew. A week later, I was on Oprah, and Oprah gave me like a side hug. No Chance walked into the room like a few weeks into working on the project and ended up asking if he could put it on his album, and it was all we got with Kanye. He wins a Grammy, I win a Grammy because of it.

Richie Burke: Hey everyone, it’s your host Richie Burke and welcome back to this episode of Milwaukee Uncut. Today we have Grammy award winning musician Grace Weber who was nice enough to drop by the studio while she was in town performing at the Pabst. She’s got some mind blowing stories from going on Oprah while she was in college to collaborating on multiple shows.

the rapper to getting signed and eventually parting ways with Capitol Records. She’s even got her own mural in Milwaukee and a new album, Paper Flower, that recently came out. Also want to give a shout out to her amazing dad and Milwaukee legend, Ralph Weber, Raweb, who was in the studio for this recording.

It was, it was great seeing him. Big fan of that guy. Before we dive in, just a reminder that Milwaukee Uncut is produced by Storymark Studios, right in the heart of Walker’s Point. In partnership with on Milwaukee and sponsored by central standard distillery I did go to the central standard craft house for dinner before grace’s concert when she was in town Had a nice date night with brie highly recommend the craft house then going to an event combo had a great time And some more milwaukee uncut news.

We’ve decided to bring on another sponsor Nicolet law fear the beard The guy on the billboards, he’s a, he’s a real human being, Russell Nicolay. He’s not just a cartoon. I had some conversations with him and learn more about his brand, what he’s building, and we are excited to announce Nicolay Law as a new sponsor of the Milwaukee Uncut Podcast.

We’ll have some fun segments with him in the future. Thanks again for tuning in today. Let’s dive in with Grace Weber.

Grace Weber: So born and raised in Milwaukee, Wauwatosa. Honestly, like I don’t even remember when I started singing like I feel like I was singing around the house by the time I was like three my dad can attest My siblings, you know, I’d be singing in the shower like Constantly before school and like taking up the shower time, you know of like needing to get ready for school And i’m just in there like And they’re like stop singing I need to get in the shower so it’s just been like a part of who I am since forever and my Grandpa is super musical was super musical.

He had 10 kids. My mom was one of 10. My dad is one of nine. So I have like literally I think I have 70 cousins with all of their married. Partners, so But yeah, so all my aunts and uncles learned instruments growing up. So christmases and thanksgiving was always singing around the piano So it was always, you know music was a part of my family.

Growing up experience and then You When I was nine, eight, nine, I performed for the first time at my school talent show. I went to St. Jude’s. And I’m going to sing a Celine Dion song. I actually peed in my pants a little bit, which was a very exciting moment for a seven year old. No one knew, but it was a moment that I recovered from through a lot of therapy.

No, I’m just kidding. But but yeah. You

Richie Burke: just hope no one notices.

Grace Weber: Yeah, no, I was like, if I can get through that, I can get through anything, you know? I was like, okay, now I can sing on any It is good to overcome adversity at a young age. At a young age. But I sang a Celine Dion song and my teacher came up to me afterwards and she was like, She was crying.

And I was like, why are you crying? Oh my God. And she was like, your song and your voice moved me. And I just remember it sort of being this like, aha moment of, whoa, like music is really powerful. And from there, you know, I sang national anthems in the city, at the Panther Arena and, you know, the Bucs Arena, or Bucs Stadium and everything.

And I joined the Central City Youth Choir here, which is a huge moment for me, like where I really, Discovered myself as a singer and what I loved about performing because in the gospel choir, it’s very interactive So, you know you’re singing and the audience the people, you know in the church are singing right back with you And they’re saying yes go do and that’s just what I loved and love about performing I really like, you know, getting the audience to sing with me and getting you know to know them throughout the show So yeah, Milwaukee You Maki is my home.

It’s where I literally became the singer and the person that I am.

Richie Burke: Did you go to college or did you just start singing right away and know you wanted to do this professionally?

Grace Weber: Yeah, I mean I knew I wanted to do it professionally, but I did go to school. I went to NYU and I was in the musical theater program.

And then I realized that, you know, musical theater wasn’t really what I wanted to do. So I switched into Gallatin at NYU, which is like the music Well, actually, Gallatin, you can make any major that you want. And so I made a major around like music business and visual art and singing. And going to NYU and living in New York was a huge part of my career.

development to being able to be a professional singer and artist, because at the end of high school, like I wasn’t ready for that. I didn’t know myself yet. I wouldn’t have been able to handle the industry and all these things. And so college was super important for me. And it’s where I, you know, started performing in New York at all these cool venues and just starting to like, I had my first band and started writing music.

And it was just such a, you know, My development was, I wouldn’t be here today with not, like, living in New York and going to NYU and just becoming who I am. What was

Richie Burke: that like, going from Milwaukee to being in your late teens, early 20s, performing at, I’m guessing, kind of hole in the wall venues in New York City, but it must have

Grace Weber: Oh yeah, it was so cool.

I remember the first week I was there in New York, I called my mom like crying and I was like, I can’t do this, New York is like so intense or whatever. And she was like, you know, just dig into it, you got this. And so once I sort of like committed to being a New Yorker and like really like digging my feet into the city like, I loved it.

I loved New York. I loved living there. And yeah, I performed at the Bitter End in the West Village. That was like one of my first cool performances when I was in college and it’s a legendary venue. It’s very like gritty, you know, it’s it’s all these cool performers that perform there. It’s one of those bars, you know, you walk in it like It smells like beer, but it just like feels so good, you know, and yeah, it was so cool to start feeling like, okay, I can do this as an original artist, you know, someone who’s writing their own music.

I think up to that point, I had had so many cool experiences as a singer you know, singing on Oprah and show Timothy Paul and all these cool things, but living in New York and performing at these venues was where I was like, Oh, okay, I can be an artist. Like, I can really. do this outside of just being a singer.

So, yeah.

Richie Burke: You just glossed over performing on Oprah. Yeah. Which is kind of a big deal. Yeah. Was that while you were in college or when did that happen and how did that come about?

Grace Weber: Yeah, it was crazy because Oprah so she had this, this You know, we’re at the end of the episode. She was like, I’m doing a karaoke challenge.

It’s called Oprah’s karaoke challenge. I want you to apply, go to the website, you know, upload a video of you singing and you might get a chance to be on the show. And so my friends were like, you got to do it. You should do it. I was like, okay, whatever. So I uploaded the video of me singing natural woman, Aretha Franklin.

And I remember even when I hit the upload button, the website kind of like glitched or something. I didn’t even know if it for sure went through. Yeah, I guess it was, yeah, like 2009 maybe. And so I didn’t even know if it went through. I was like, yeah, well, whatever. And then a few weeks later I got surprised by an Oprah camera crew in the subway, New York City subway system.

And they were like, you’re gonna be on Oprah! There were all these like lights and stuff. I was like, oh my god, like I’m gonna be on the Oprah Winfrey show. And then a week later I was on Oprah and Oprah gave me like a side hug and it was amazing and like, boom! Completely terrifying and life changing and, and all the things.

Yeah, You

Richie Burke: didn’t know it was coming? There was just a camera crew in the subway? There was

Grace Weber: a camera crew. Well, my

Richie Burke: Waiting for you?

Grace Weber: Yeah. My college roommate got contacted by the show, because I had to put like two contacts in there, and I think it was probably my parents, and maybe they called my roommate. I don’t really remember exactly how it worked, but they set up the surprise through her.

And so actually, she like walked me to the subway because she wanted to get like lunch or something. Right before we went down the stairs, she was like, okay, listen, I have to tell you, like, like there’s like an over camera crew down there. I was like, what are you saying? You’re just like, yeah, you got picked for that thing.

And so I like was kind of prepared for it, but also like even more like, Oh my God, how the heck am I going to handle this? And, well, yeah, it was, it was incredible. It was funny, fun, random, amazing. All those things. How

Richie Burke: nerve wracking was that going on there?

Grace Weber: It was terrifying. Like, it was my first big performance like that, like, on a TV show like that, like, Oprah Winfrey.

And, you know, I was on all the, like, local news stations here doing interviews and, you know Billy Ray Cyrus was one of the coaches, Gladys Knight, Ashford and Simpson, and it was, it was also, like, a karaoke challenge, so they were, like, judging you, and And they picked winners and stuff at the end.

And so How many

Richie Burke: people and coaches got on this thing?

Grace Weber: There were like, I want to say 13, 12, 13 of us from around the country. And they actually gave us names. Like there was like, The cowboy, the Midwestern girl. I was the mid Midwestern girl.

Richie Burke: That was That was your nickname? That was my nickname.

Literally the Midwestern girl. The Midwestern girl. Nice, nice. So like my favorite, like very creative. Yes,

Grace Weber: I know, right? I was like, and they, that my backstory was very Midwest. It was like. You know, she basically like I grew up on a farm even though I did not grow up on a farm But they they really you know honed in on that but did ralph make

Richie Burke: an appearance in the trailer ralph

Grace Weber: Yeah, ralph.

Oh, yeah ralph made an appearance on the show. He was in the audience with my mom you know, they panned to the To the parents you have to have the parents moment and they were very proud. What do

Richie Burke: your friends call him again?

Grace Weber: raw web

Richie Burke: Okay I went raw off which was incorrect. So yeah It’s like

Grace Weber: Raw web, he’s just he’s the boss.

That’s what they They think he’s just they think he’s like just such a baller. He has that energy We can mic him up

Richie Burke: if we need to and bring him off the bench

So you got on there you didn’t you did not make it through but you still walked away with like 25 grand, right? Yeah,

Grace Weber: that was the other crazy thing. Is that at that age? That’s pretty sweet. It was nuts and we were surprised you know, like so we I made it through like the first round and and When we did the moment of like, you know, say goodbye to this, these guys, whatever.

She was like, and I have a surprise for you. And she’s like, you each are getting 25, 000 and people, someone walked out with a check, the 25, 000 check in their hand, and we were all like, what the hell? Like, it was insane. And it definitely was, like, not that it wasn’t worth it before that, like, it was, you know, Incredible, but then that moment like the level was already here I didn’t think that it could go up and then it went like, you know, 25 000 above that And I wrote oprah a thank you note For the money, I don’t know if she ever got it, but I was like, dear Oprah, thank you for the experience and giving me 25, 000.

I think I sent it to like, the Oprah network, you know, if you’re watching Oprah. I’m sure

Richie Burke: she has it framed somewhere. Yeah, some, someday we’re

Grace Weber: going to meet, she’d be like, oh, you’re the one that wrote me the thank you note. Yeah, it’s framed. That’s

Richie Burke: very nice of you.

Grace Weber: You know, you’re supposed to write a Someone 25 grand, you should write them a nice thank you card.

Yeah, I was raised for that.

Richie Burke: What did that do to your career right after? Did you get the flood of attention that people think you get after you appear on a show like that?

Grace Weber: Yeah, yeah, I mean it was, it was a lot of pressure that I don’t think I was like ready for at that point. And like people in my class were like, you know, you were on Oprah, like my teachers were like, This is the girl that was on Oprah.

And so, and it kind of became like a, not like a shtick at all, but it was just like, like you’re on Oprah. It’s just such like a, a random, amazing thing. And so, yeah, I did like label meetings. I met with Universal and I had like managers kind of coming out of the woodwork and it was amazing because it gave me like this lesson, life lesson of like, My first introduction, introduction to the industry, but it was also kind of this learning moment of like, okay, like this is intense.

And like, how do you get yourself in the right head space and like, you know, art space and heart space and all these like, you know, physical and mental spaces to be able to handle that. Yeah, and it was so fun and that kind of launched everything from there. That’s how I. started a real career and got a team around me and yeah, it was awesome.

Richie Burke: And how did your career progress from

Grace Weber: there? From there, I mean, one of the, the big like turning points for me was when I met the Social Experiment Chance’s production crew. So it was Nate Fox, Nico Siegel, and Peter Cottontail. And they produced Acid Rap by Chance, which was like his first really big project that he put out.

Maybe this was in. 2015 I think he put that out and I heard the project And the first song in the project is called good ass intro and it’s like this gospel Gospel choir sounds with like hip hop and R& B and like everything that I was Hoping to put into my music and trying to figure out, you know, how do I incorporate like gospel sounds not in a religious way but like Just that those types of choral sounds with the r& b thing that I want to do And with like a current a current sound too.

Like I think up to that point I had really been Doing more of like an old school soul thing kind of like Adele or like really trying to find my sound that was like who I am as an artist. And so when I heard Good Ass Intro on Chance’s, you know, project, I was like, Who are these producers? This is who I want to work with.

This is who I want to develop my sound with. Like, I don’t want to sound like anyone else except for me. So I put some feelers out and I was like, do you guys, does anyone know like the social experiment? You know, Nate Fox, whatever and none of my friends knew them So I kind of just like put it out into the universe and a few months later I was in LA and a buddy of mine texted me and he was like, hey, I’m going to the studio If you want to come through like here’s the address whatever you didn’t say who was there and I was so tired and I was one of those days where I was like Should I go?

Should I go to bed? Whatever. And then I was like, no, you gotta go, you gotta rally. So I went and I met these guys, Nate and Nico, and I didn’t really know what they looked like. They were just kind of this like the social experiment. And it was kind of a little, this was like 2015 when I met them. And so like Instagram wasn’t that big of a thing.

Like and so I didn’t, and Nico went by Donnie Trumpet at the time. So I just like, didn’t put it together that I was meeting The guys that I had been wanting to meet this whole time. And so they pulled up this track. It was amazing. Like this, it just sounded so good. And I was like, Hey, can I sing on this?

Like, let me get in the, in the booth and sing. So I got in the booth. I sang like it was. It’s so dope, like it sounded amazing with me on the track or whatever and so I got out of the booth and the guys were like, yo, you’re so dope, like who are you, whatever. And you know, told them who I was and I was like, who are you?

Like, what do you guys do? They’re like, oh, we go by the Social Experiment. I’m like, no way! I was like, I’ve been trying to meet you guys, this is crazy. And so then like, I literally asked them, I was like, do you want to produce an album? an album with me and they said yes and so that was really a huge moment because not only did it you know help me develop my own sound but you know Chance walked into the room like a few weeks into working on the project and he heard a song that we were working on for my album And ended up asking if he could put it on his album and it was all we got with Kanye West and so all of a sudden like i’m on chance the rapper’s project like He wins a grammy.

I won a grammy because of it and then you know All this buzz was around me and all these because the social experiment chance were so buzzy and whatever and you know I released a song from that project in 2017 that john mayer tweeted and it kind of went viral and You And then I got signed to Capitol and all these things.

So it was like, that moment, I think like, Oprah, Show Timothy Paolo, like, all these, going to NYU, like, performing at the Bitter End, all these things were preparing me, like, for that moment. And I think when that happened, I was so ready to step into that and just was so happy, like, I loved it so much. I think before that, I was kind of scared, you know, like, I didn’t want to be too vulnerable You know, get like boot off the stage or whatever.

Then when I was in my mid twenties, you know, I was like, okay, cool. Like I got this, I know who I am and I feel confident to do this. Yeah.

Richie Burke: Were you in shock at all when this was happening or did you feel like you belonged, what was that like?

Grace Weber: I felt more like I belonged like, cause it was, it was really magical.

Like being in that studio when Chance was working on coloring book and when those producers were just So in their zone creatively like they were the type of guys I had never met anyone like them like the producers that I had been working with up to this up to that point were sort of like older producers, people who had worked on like joss stone projects or like or like Not adele literally, but that type of like, that type of artist and so yeah, they were kind of in their like Late fifties, early sixties.

And so the vibe in the studios were always, you know, chill. It was usually in like pretty big professional studios, sort of like a high pressure situation. Not like the most loose. And when I met Nate and Nico, the studio that I walked into LA in LA was like filled with weed smoke. Like you just walked in and you’re like, I was like, okay.

I like every, there was like a ton of people chilling in there, just smoking, And I remember just kind of sitting on the couch and being like, okay, this is cool.

Richie Burke: The Midwest girl. Oh, for sure. I was totally the Midwest girl. Living up to your

Grace Weber: name. Oh, big time. Like I had never been in like that cool of a setting before.

And and Nate, you know, up to that point, like when I was in the studio, you come with a song prepared and then you record it. But with Nate and Nico, like we were making the song as, making the project together as we went along. And so when we, the first day, when we got started. he just handed me a mic. I was sitting on the couch and this was their studio is like this really cool space, like a house basically.

And he just handed me the microphone was like, yeah, just start singing when you feel like it. So they’d pull up this beat and I’d start singing. And, and so they were just in there like creative high point chance was just like killing it. Everybody was so a part of this moment of like, You know, Chance is going to win Best New Artist, like, just everything was happening and so being there, like, I felt like I was supposed to be there at that moment.

Because of just how, like, I don’t know, it was just so magical. It was amazing, yeah.

Richie Burke: And then you get signed to Capitol.

Grace Weber: Yeah.

Richie Burke: Tell me about that.

Grace Weber: Yeah, Capitol was awesome. I actually, like, So I got signed in 2018 and it was a pretty crazy process because so they were interested in me because this song went viral when John Mayer tweeted it and all these things and like because I had just won the Grammy and And the Social Experiment guys were like probably some of the biggest producers at that time.

Richie Burke: And you still don’t have your debut album out at this point, right? Correct, yeah. You just were collaborating with the Social Experiment. Were you putting out your own music as well on top of that? I had

Grace Weber: put out some stuff like a few years ago but then I took it down because it wasn’t really like who I wanted to be as an artist.

Yeah. It was sort of like that exploratory phase and so I didn’t really have anything out at that point. So what are you listed

Richie Burke: at as an unlike chances? This may be a dumb question music wise. I’m just curious

Grace Weber: Writer got it saying on it too. So you if you like listen to it, you’ll writer vocalist. Yeah writer vocalist.

Yeah And they, and by being that, because he won I think he won best new artists and best hip hop album. But you get a Grammy because you’re part of the project. Yeah. So yeah, so capital, you know, they were interested, you know, they started hitting up my manager and like the conversation began and then they, like the head of A& R from capital came to see me live, he loved it.

And then, you know, the process began of like, we want to sign her. And I ended up officially signing in like the summer of 2018. And it was really cool. It was crazy. I mean, it was like definitely the next level when the first meeting that I had with the label, there’s like, You know, 10 people sitting in a circle talking about, you know, your project and what, and at that point I had the project like almost ready to go.

So they had heard the whole album. Chance was on the project. We had Westside Boogie on the project, like some huge features. And so Vic Mensa was on it. And so for them, that was also really exciting that they just loved the album. And that’s really why I got signed is because they were excited to put it out.

And yeah, it was, it was crazy. You know, you get a big advance, you get all these like fancy people around you. And, and I think it was a learning experience because it really showed me like, okay, this is how the major labels work

Speaker 5: and I

Grace Weber: loved it actually. Like the harder times for me around that time was I was kind of like, Switching up my own team.

And so going through that was kind of like the trial, I guess, in that time. And being on Capitol was really cool. And when they ended up dropping Muse and 2019, and it was just because we put out one song with Vic, it didn’t really do that well. And they were kind of like, you know, we could keep investing in this and you might be like shelved or we don’t know what’s going to happen because the first song didn’t, You know, the return wasn’t as big as we wanted it to be based on the investment.

And they’re like, so we think it’d be better for you to like, go your own way and we’ll give you back your masters, which was also insane, like very unheard of that they gave me back my masters after paying for the mixing and mastering and like the advance and all these things. So that was so cool.

That’s

Richie Burke: a classy move.

Grace Weber: Yes. It was amazing. So I left the

Richie Burke: whole Taylor Swift feud is about right. She didn’t have that.

Grace Weber: A hundred percent. If they hadn’t given me back my masters, I wouldn’t have been able to release the album with Chance. That whole first project would just be sitting. In a box in capital so for them to do that was huge and i’m so grateful and that’s why I only have good things to say about capital really cool people who worked there super supportive and just like Incredible that they believed in me enough to give me back my masters.

I think was pretty cool

Richie Burke: Hey guys, it’s your host richie burke. I just wanted to take a moment to thank our sponsor central standard distillery As I mentioned in the intro brie and I went to the craft house before the grace weber concert You Brie thinks their fries are like McDonald’s but better.

There’s no higher compliment that she could potentially or possibly pay to a restaurant. They are good. Their old fashions are good as well. So if you’re looking for a nice date night spot, I highly recommend Central Standard. Or if you’re just looking to get after it a little bit and have a good time, highly recommend going with Central Standard.

Also, got some really nice Milwaukee uncut hats coming in. Not, not like cheap ones, like legitimately nice ones. Our friend Ryan from AKA Custom Lids created. So if you do subscribe and you leave a review, we are picking one person a week and sending one of these out to just leave your Instagram handle or your email at the end of the review, and we will reach out to you.

If you are the one randomly selected. Alright, let’s get back into the episode with Grace Weber.

Grace Weber: The album is out. Listen to it. It’s, I love it. I love it. It’s all love songs. I haven’t really written a lot of love songs up to this point, and I wanted to make a project that was all love songs, different points of view on love.

There’s a self love song, song about my husband, who’s also from Wisconsin, Madison. We met at summer camp when we were 13, Camp Minakani, shout out. And yeah, I love it. I’m so happy. It’s doing really well. We have amazing people on the project, work with amazing people. Yeah, I love it.

Richie Burke: So you met your husband when you were 13.

Yeah. When did you start dating when you were in college? Did I hear, I did some homework on, on your life, obviously, before the interview, but.

Grace Weber: Oh, yeah, freshman year we started dating. We went to prom together though, senior year of high school, but when he walked in the room, like at summer camp, you know, I remember it was like slow motion, like seeing him walk into the dining hall and just being like, who is that boy?

Like just instantly in love. But yeah, so I had a crush on him forever. And then. In high senior of high school. I was like I’ve always had a crush on you and he was like i’ve always had a crush on you and then the rest is history You know

Richie Burke: nice How hard is it maintaining a relationship in your 20s in the industry you’re in?

Grace Weber: Yeah, honestly it is Hard unless you date someone like my husband who is so trusting chill like so supportive of my dreams like You He just never ever ever wanted to hold me back from anything, you know, whether I was in I would stay in LA when I was working on the project for like a couple months And he never made me feel bad like He was just always so trusting supportive and loving and you know I was like that to him as well.

And so because we just had this friendship and partnership, you know, we were able to Do that, but it is hard because you’re around, you know, so many people all the time the studio can be sort of like Wild, you know lots of like In your twenties, like lots of, I didn’t smoke, but I would always get contact high because they all smoked so much.

They smoked a lot. But yeah, so yeah, for me it was, it worked.

Richie Burke: What, what would you say the single biggest break you’ve had in your career has been? Was it Oprah?

Grace Weber: No, it was the chant stuff. Like that was, That was huge because and it was

Richie Burke: serendipitously showing up to the studio when you didn’t want to show up If you never did that that never would have happened

Grace Weber: a hundred percent.

Richie Burke: It’s good lesson to people to show up

Grace Weber: That’s and that’s what I say there. I met some kids last night. At the that might be is that raw web? Raw web.

Richie Burke: Raw web, right in the middle of a good story. Right in the

Grace Weber: middle of, I was just about to pour my heart out.

Richie Burke: When you’re, when you’re a boss, you can do that.

When you’re a boss, the rules don’t apply to you. The rules don’t apply. You were with some kids last night. A girl came

Grace Weber: up to me, she’s like, I want to be a singer. How do you get started? Like, what do you do? And I was like, honestly, like, it’s showing up, you know, like, Putting yourself in positions to be there like when lightning strikes because there’s so much that you can’t control in the industry like you can do everything right and that’s just you can’t quite get to the places that you want to but if you just like trust, you know, like I put a video up on Oprah’s thing just because like, okay, you know, and that led to this huge thing or, you know, I went to the studio and that led to this.

And so I told her like, you know, you hitting me, she was a string player. She was like, you even talking to me right now? I’m like, Asking me questions. Like now I know what you want to do if I’m in Milwaukee. Like maybe I need some cello on a song. I’ll think of you because you came up to me and we know each other now.

You’ll come in the studio. Maybe, you know, chance a rapper will be there. And then all of a sudden you’re on this huge album. So it’s all about just like putting yourself out there and being willing to take risks to like, you know, fall on your face and just be okay with that and get back up and, And yeah.

Richie Burke: Yeah. A hundred percent. I’ve gotten a, a number of clients showing up to events that I did not feel like showing up to. And you meet some person that leads to something else

Richie Burke: yeah, showing up is very important. What would you say the biggest struggle that you’ve ever had in your career has been that you’ve had to overcome?

Grace Weber: Like not feeling good enough or feeling like I am trying to make it in this like on this level that I don’t even know what that means, you know, like, I feel like in the industry, there’s such a thing of like, you make it or you don’t make it. And so when you’re growing up, there’s this concept of, And it’s sort of this like ethereal thing that’s like, okay, at some point I’m going to feel like I made it because I’m doing X, Y, Z.

And I think because you’re so focused on that, which maybe it’s, you know, singing to a sold out, you know, 5, 000 seater venue, or maybe it’s, you know, like singing on Oprah, it could have been a made it moment for me, but I was so focused on like, I don’t know this feeling that I was supposed to feel of like making it that I forgot to like Embrace every single moment that was very special in that moment And you know Oprah was actually a big moment where I realized that because I was so nervous to be on the show That I kind of like Blacked out not really literally, but I barely remembered it and I was like, I don’t want that to happen again We’re like I’m in a situation and I can’t really remember it cuz I’m so like scared to mess up But yeah, so I just really focusing keep reminding myself like, you know last night was a moment that I want to remember and I want to cherish and like I don’t want to judge it as being, you know, good or bad.

Like, I just want to be in the moment with it. And I think trying to getting over that, you know, and like getting over your ego kind of like, Oh, like, if so, this many people show up, like, does that mean that I’m not good enough or dah, dah, dah? Like, just letting go or like, if I don’t get this award or whatever, like, Letting go of all of that stuff is what has helped me just fall in love with music and with being an artist.

And so that was a process. It’s still a process of getting over. Yeah.

Richie Burke: I’m sure. I want to dig a little deeper into that because you’re in such a kind of high trigger environment for that, where every piece of content you put out, you’re getting judged by how many views it has, how many people show up to your shows.

It’s just the nature of it. And there are real consequences if you don’t get a lot of views. Like. Getting dropped, or if you get a ton of views and new opportunities can open up. So that stuff does matter, but it’s not healthy to pay attention to it or keep clicking refresh, which I’m sure is really easy to do.

What do you do? I also not to go on a tangent, but I was listening to your. Podcast episode with Charlie on his Christ cast, which would have been probably two and a half years ago at this point in time. But you talked about mental health and doing meditation and Buddhist chanting and stuff, stuff, stuff like that.

So I’m just curious how you manage that because it is, it is a real thing, especially in your industry and in a lot of people’s work lives, even there. They’re getting judged on output and metrics and

Grace Weber: yeah, I mean, it’s really tough like Instagram I think has done a number on all of our mental health because like it’s like you’re getting likes it and like in you you start like tracking your self worth based on like how many likes you get on a post and like It can feel especially when you put so much effort into a post or something and then you feel like oh It didn’t get received or people didn’t like it.

Like it’s, it’s so sad that like social media has done that to us. There’s also like so many beautiful things about social media. Obviously for careers have been made, you know, beautiful stories are told, but the negative sides are, are really hard to get over. And I think like for me at the beginning of my tour, I was really stressed because ticket sales weren’t as high as I wanted them to be.

I was super nervous to let the venues down. Like, I didn’t know if yeah, like if it was gonna be good enough. And at the first show I felt sad and it wasn’t like, I wasn’t in this mindset of like loving being on stage and in the same way that the Oprah thing was this turning point of like, I don’t ever want to not remember a special moment.

The first night of the tour, after I got off the stage, I was like, I don’t want to, like, not enjoy this. I don’t want to like not have fun. I don’t want to not give myself a hundred percent to the audience. So what do I need to do mentally to like get in a space where I can be more present and be happy and have fun?

And so for me it was like a practice of switching the mindset from like, you know, how can I control people getting in the room and like all these things that don’t really matter to like, you know, what can I Control and that’s actually letting go like I can just let myself let go I can You know, meet people who told me, you know, your song got me through breast cancer or DMS where it’s saying you know, someone told me my life is in pieces right now.

I’m getting to be at your show for an hour, like gave me a break and show me that I can make it through. And so focusing on that was like so freeing and it. makes you realize, like, every single person that you can touch and who can touch you, that’s what matters, not, like, how many likes you get. And that is a practice, like, Buddhism has helped me with that for sure.

Like, to desire nothing is the The art of life or something, but yeah, it’s a process. It’s a focusing on just like what you love, you know, instead of everything else and, and practicing that, I think is the biggest thing. Also my, I always tell people this for performers, like there’s this thing that you can do.

Where you like, check after the show to see if it was good enough. Like, oh, what did you think? Like, was it good? Did that, did I do that one part? Did you notice when I messed that up, da da da? And I used to do it in my 20s and I realized that there was a moment where someone was like, Oh, I thought it was really good.

You didn’t think it was good? And then I kind of was like, Oh, I took away your experience from the show kind of like, like you thought it was, you had an amazing experience with it. And now I’m coming and sort of, Telling you all the things that I’m overthinking and I’m kind of taking away from your experience at the show And so I stopped doing that.

I stopped checking if the shows were good enough Like I just walked off stage and I was like, okay cool. I did that. That was like an hour That was really fun. And now I move on to the next thing and because of that I started enjoying the show so much more because I knew I wasn’t going to overthink it afterwards.

Speaker 5: Yeah.

Grace Weber: And I could take in people’s reactions better. Like, I would, you know, meet people after the show and they’d be like, You were amazing, I loved it. And I’d be like, Thank you. Yeah. Instead of, Are you sure? You know, it’s just a different way of experience, or like, experiencing the before and after shows.

And that has been, if you’re a performer and you are looking for a breakthrough, that has changed my life. To just say, Thank you. To, to just wake up in the morning. Yeah, that’s a lot of why you got into

Richie Burke: it in the first place too, and it’s, it’s tough when you’re doing it for a living and numbers matter and how many people show up matters, but it can take away from it.

We have a performance consultant coming on a couple of weeks. His name’s Raymond Pryor. He works with a lot of top musicians and athletes and his whole thing too is like acceptance and letting go. If you can accept any outcome, then you’re going to go out there and perform a lot better, whether it’s sports or you’re going on stage and.

I found that valuable opposed to just Yeah, worrying about the, the outcome while you’re doing it

Grace Weber: a hundred percent. Well, and last night, like the mic didn’t work when I walked on stage, I was going to ask you about that. You handle,

Richie Burke: you handled it so

Grace Weber: well because it’s like,

Richie Burke: you walked out there in front of your hometown audience and you just start singing and nothing comes out.

I’m sitting in the upper deck right behind raw web and I was like, Oh no. And you had a smile on your face. You like made light of the situation and it came on. Yeah. Fifteen seconds later and you killed it.

Grace Weber: Cause it’s funny, it’s fun like the light hearted energy of it too, like, yeah, it’s like, this is supposed to be fun.

It’s not like Yeah, so that was that was fun.

Richie Burke: What was going through your head when that happened and there’s like five or ten seconds

Grace Weber: I thought it was funny It’s like cuz I was like, what’s up? And like nothing came out and I first I was like, is that just my like in ears or the monitor? Is there no sound there?

But then I could tell that it wasn’t coming out in the theater but then I was like and then I was like I know that the sound guys are freaking out right now because they’re like You Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. So then, I had like empathy for them because I could only imagine how stressed they were.

But I was like, okay, it’s going to come back on in a second, like just roll with it. And then I was like, I get so lonely, and it still wasn’t on. And I was like, all right, like what’s the, what are we doing here? Like, and then I just was like, okay, let’s just take a pause. And yeah, just said, okay, we’re going to start that over.

And I was looking over at the sound guy, like watching him freak out with like wires and stuff. And I could tell that he like, Just had figured it out and then it came back on and it it was Again, like moments like that are kind of funny, especially because i’ve never experienced that before And so now I had the moment where a mic wasn’t on and I Realize that it wasn’t that bad.

Yeah.

Richie Burke: Yeah, you handled that very well. Before we get to the standard five, five quick questions sponsored by Central Standard. To end the show, I do want to dive a little bit deeper. What are you doing right now for your mental health and physical health? You look like you’re in great shape as well.

I think both of those things are really important in business life.

Grace Weber: 100%. Working out a ton has changed. What do

Richie Burke: you do?

Grace Weber: I am a Peloton fan. Toonday is my girl. I love her so much. She’s my favorite. Do you

Richie Burke: do the spinning and the floor workouts?

Grace Weber: I do, like, the spinning and the arms. And then I do abs with Mad Fit on YouTube.

She’s also my other girl that I love. And, I, yeah, I joined, I got a gym membership. Because I live in downtown LA, which is kind of like, intense ish. If you’ve ever been down there, it’s a little Gnarly, but it’s I also love it because you can like walk everywhere It kind of reminds me of New York a little bit but my husband and I got a gym membership and that like changed our life because we had a place to retreat to there’s like a sauna and a steam room and And the more I worked out, the more that I felt like mentally calm.

Cause the one thing about control, like I’ve learned to let go. That’s where I feel the best mentally, but working out like you actually do have control over that. Like if you want to feel that in somewhere in your life, like you can get on the bike, you can lift weights like, and you can go into a space for that hour or two hours or whatever, and be focusing just on like, The physical process of lifting 10 pound weights.

And so that, and Buddhist. You still, you still chanting? I don’t chant anymore. I D I did what is chanting because there was a time like in 2019, 20, yeah, 2019 where I just had gone through some crazy stuff that we’ll talk about after the podcast. But I needed. I needed something to like pull me out of that.

And it was also kind of the serendipitous thing where I, I googled like Buddhist stuff. I don’t even remember what I did. And like this thing came up on Google maps and it was like, come join the Buddhist chanting thing in Topanga Canyon. So I was like, okay. So I went to this thing, it was like all these like old hippies living in Topanga Canyon and they were like Buddhist chanting.

And I’m like, all right, this is weird and cool. And, but that was like a moment in my life that. Was great and now I just kind of try to I go to therapy. That’s very important for me. I have a great therapist Nice. Yeah, that’s something that like when I’m when I start going into a place of like overthinking or Worrying about all these things like I’m kind of like, okay.

I need to check in With my therapist and then I she does a little tune up and we’re back.

Richie Burke: Yeah, no shame in that I was in therapy for a while I had a really bad panic attack on an airplane like six seven years ago And another one like three weeks ago for the first time in a while. I get bad when planes are stalled But anyway, I went I had experienced a lot of anxiety issues I never had after that for the first time and was in therapy for a while and she had me doing exposure therapy And that’s when I first got into breath work, because I thought it was very weird and far out there before.

It’s made a huge difference. There’s a bunch of other healthy habits, so.

Grace Weber: Panic attacks, I’ve had panic attacks, a lot of them over my life, and it’s Not fun. It’s not fun. It’s very stressful. And it’s scary. It’s like a very scary feeling. And so getting to, like, work on that with therapists is like, Life changing to be able to know how to handle those moments for sure

Richie Burke: absolutely all right on a more light hearted note We’ll move into the standard five sponsored by Central Standard I’ve been curious what what percentage of artists drink or smoke before going on

Grace Weber: A lot.

Probably not smoke, like singers probably don’t smoke that much. I used to drink before every show, like I used to have beer because I was too afraid what like hard, like I didn’t want to be drunk on stage, but I kind of wanted to take the edge off. Interesting. But I stopped, so it helped me feel like looser on stage.

Did you have

Richie Burke: like a couple beers where you were kind of hitting that perfect alcohol level, not over the top? I would kind of plan it.

Grace Weber: I’d have like one before stage and then I’d have one on stage so that I kind of knew like how loose I was gonna be. But then I stopped doing that because I realized again like I want to see what it’s like to be totally in the moment, you know, and, and not have to need something to loosen up.

And at first it was like terrifying. I was very aware of like every mistake that I was making. I actually started, this was like a year ago, I started doing the like checking thing again where I was like, was that good? Because I was so present. Like when I would drink afterwards, I’d be kind of like, and I’m like, whatever.

And so it was a good practice of like, okay, let me. let me get over needing to Need something to feel free like because now I feel like I don’t need anything to get like in the zone and feel really relaxed on stage and that is such a freeing feeling of like And now like even socially like I don’t feel like I need to drink as much and that also makes me feel more confident and Yeah, so not to say that I Don’t think alcohol is awesome.

Central Standard, I am having some of

Richie Burke: their gin right now. I

Grace Weber: know, I’m

Richie Burke: like, and Slightly hung over today since because of you I went to your show last night. I usually don’t go out during the week So I’m having a drink To be lively on the show to try and hit that level But

Grace Weber: yeah, we have a bottle of tequila in the green room The band usually takes a shot before like it’s it’s definitely a thing.

Richie Burke: Yeah What is the single coolest moment of your career?

Grace Weber: Single coolest moment. Oh my god singing the national anthem at the Packers game a playoffs game in January. It was 2020 when was that 2021? A year ago. That was only a year ago?

Richie Burke: Raweb knows exactly when it was. Raweb.

Grace Weber: Well, so he came. It was so cool because first of all, it was It was the

Richie Burke: game they lost.

Yeah, it was. Yeah, that was a bad game.

Grace Weber: Yeah, it was. Lil Wayne was there. I got to meet him. No way. He was in the box like right next to us. It was so cool.

Richie Burke: Oh, that’s so cool.

Grace Weber: That was just so fun. Like to get to sing at this middle of Lambeau Field. For a Packers game and like my dad, you know got to be on the The home field what’s called the field sideline sideline.

Thank you Like what’s it called the sidelines, you know Dane was there like it was just so cool and then to like be Nail it, you know, in this big setting and I actually practiced in a freezer, in a walk in freezer because I wasn’t sure what it was going to be like to sing in like freezing temperatures.

Cold

Richie Burke: exposure is good for you. I got into that last spring.

Grace Weber: Yeah, it’s great. It’s very refreshing. Yeah. So go stand in the middle of Lambeau Field when it’s 10 degrees and you’ll feel very alive afterwards.

Richie Burke: If I remember correctly, Raw Web, you may remember this as well. I think they scored a touchdown on their first drive.

Grace Weber: Yeah, they did and

Richie Burke: did not score after that probably inspired by grace weber and then the rest was kind of the downfall barrett rogers

Grace Weber: Yeah

Richie Burke: before he made it to New York, but

Grace Weber: yeah,

Richie Burke: yeah, that was a good That was a great five minutes and Packer history between your national anthem and the first drive right there

Grace Weber: Yeah, especially because the drive was inspired by me.

Richie Burke: What is the most star struck you’ve ever been?

Grace Weber: Chad Smith, Red Hot Chili Peppers, he was friends, or is friends with someone I worked with. And so I got to like stay at his house and like become friends with him, which is really cool. And I got to like be side stage when he was playing in South America when I was touring with Chance.

And I like got to go hang with like Chad Smith, the drummer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, which was cool. That Chance was, has like a very, very, You know, magnetic star quality. So when he walked in the room for the first time, I was like, well, chance is very like buzzy, but yeah, I think those Guillermo del Toro is a fan, the filmmaker.

That’s

Speaker 5: cool.

Grace Weber: I haven’t met him, but he like followed me on Twitter and I was like, Hey, Guillermo, you know, maker of Pan’s Labyrinth. And he was like, I’m such a fan of your music. Like the light singer, songwriter, soulful person. It’s cool

Richie Burke: to get those random messages. I’m sure you’ve gotten. Several over your career didn’t I was listening to something else didn’t Dwight Howard like reach out to you and come to the show Which would be very hard to miss as he’s just a jacked Seven foot one guy.

Grace Weber: Yeah, I like what I think I when I gave him like a hug I was up to his like hip but yeah, probably so you’re not that short either Oh, i’m pretty five two.

Richie Burke: Are you only five two?

Grace Weber: People think i’m tall. It’s weird.

Richie Burke: Maybe it’s the stage presence You play above that.

Grace Weber: Yeah, i’m I play six Two, but I’m really

Richie Burke: yeah more than five two.

Grace Weber: Yeah

Richie Burke: What is the craziest thing that’s ever happened to you on tour?

Grace Weber: Craziest thing that’s ever happened to me on tour. i’m trying to think of like some of the like when I was Well, i’ll say when the mic didn’t go on last night. Just kidding. Not really, but I have never experienced that but When I was touring so I sang backgrounds for chance in south america And when he was doing the Lollapalooza tour, and there was a show in Sao Paolo, Sao Paolo, Sao Paolo, I can’t think of things today.

And there was like 200, 000 people in this like festival setting cause he was opening for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And so him plus them, like I’ve never stood in front of that many people and witnessing like the intimate moments where it felt like we were in like a, Cafe was incredible and it was one of those Moments that I’ll never forget of just like the power of music connecting with and Touching like 200 000 people.

It was nuts. Yeah.

Richie Burke: Yeah, that’s crazy. It was awesome what’s your favorite place to go to when you’re back home in milwaukee?

Grace Weber: Ghillie’s ghillie’s ice cream.

Richie Burke: Nice.

Grace Weber: Yeah, i’m the biggest fan of their custard burgers fries I like, I actually haven’t gotten any ice cream yet, or custard, that’s very important, custard.

You’ve got a few more days here. I know. Oh yeah, it’s definitely happening. Like, I literally can’t leave without having Achilles cone. So yeah, that, but, you know, my parents house, all those special places. In Tosa. Yeah, Tosa, represent.

Richie Burke: Yep. Last question, what do you love most about Milwaukee? Milwaukee.

Milwaukee.

Grace Weber: I love the energy here. I love like the kindness of people. I love just like, yeah, like how warm it feels here. I love, I was getting, you know, a beer last night with my friend from high school and it just felt like, you know, we haven’t seen each other in like a year or so and it just felt like we saw each other yesterday and I feel like that’s what’s so cool about Milwaukee is that you can really form these like Lifelong friendships.

There’s so many things here that you can connect over like The Packers or you know cheese like these things that don’t seem that like monumental but then they are because they’re so like bonding and in a weird way that Makes you feel like very close to people. There’s there’s like a pride like a Milwaukee, Wisconsin pride that I I think it’s really cool.

Richie Burke: For sure.

Grace Weber: Yeah.

Richie Burke: Thanks so much for coming on today. It was great meeting you.

Grace Weber: Thanks for having me on. This was awesome.

Richie Burke: Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of Milwaukee Uncut with Grace Weber. Just a reminder, subscribe and write a review and leave your email or Instagram handle at the end of that review.

To enter our weekly drawing. We’ve got some really nice Milwaukee uncut hats and some other prizes coming in. So if you do subscribe and leave a review, we’ll be picking one person a week as a winner. This episode was produced by Story Mark Studios right in the heart of Walkers Point in partnership with On Milwaukee and sponsored by Central, Standard Distillery and Nicolet Law Offices.

David Crowley: Milwaukee County Executive

David Crowley: Milwaukee County Executive

From growing up in the 53206 to becoming the youngest elected and first Black elected Milwaukee Country Executive David Crowley has an amazing story.

From growing up in the 53206 to becoming the youngest elected and first Black elected Milwaukee Country Executive David Crowley has an amazing story. 

In this episode we cover his back story, go behind the scenes of what is going in Milwaukee, the challenges, the progress that is being made and what is to come in 2024. 

For Additional Clips and Content Follow Milwaukee Uncut on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/milwaukeeuncut/

Milwaukee Uncut is produced by Story Mark Studios: https://storymarkstudios.com/

Sponsored by Central Standard Distillery: https://thecentralstandard.com/

In Partnership with OnMilwaukee: https://onmilwaukee.com/


Transcript

David Crowley: I was also encouraged to leave Milwaukee, and I always felt that that was, that didn’t sit right for me. I felt that the fight was right here in my own backyard. And so I wanted to stay and be a part of the change that I want my kids to be able to benefit from. These are the things that we have to be fighting for.

Richie Burke: Hey everyone. Welcome back to Milwaukee Uncut, sponsored by Central Standard Distillery, produced by Story Mark Studios and in partnership with. On Milwaukee. If you’re wondering what is going on in the city of Milwaukee and what the key initiatives are for 2024, including the RNC, which we dive into, we’ve got a huge year ahead.

This is a great episode for you. I’ve got Milwaukee County executive David Crowley joining me. He has an incredible backstory that we go over at the beginning. Milwaukee born and raised the first elected black Milwaukee County executive and The youngest, he took the position nearly four years ago at age 33 and is up for reelection this spring.

We also go inside the deal that keeps the brewers in Milwaukee through 2050 that got passed late last year, as well as the new sales tax deal for the city and the county that took effect on January one. What is it? What does that mean for you? This is also the first time in 20 years that Milwaukee County is projected to have a budget surplus.

That surplus is projected to be 31. 6 million. Not bad in a country that is 34 trillion in debt and climbing. So props to the County Executive and his team for setting an example. All right, let’s dive in with David Crowley.

David Crowley: You know born and raised here in the city of Milwaukee. I grew up on, on 23rd and Barline that, that, that famous zip code that we’re always talking about the 53206 zip code, which is one of the highest incarcerated zip codes in the state of Wisconsin, possibly in the country, when we think about not just individuals who are, are, who are incarcerated, but returning home from incarceration And during my, my, my younger years, it was a struggle.

both of my parents both struggle with, with drug addiction and mental health. we faced a lot of different housing insecurity, being, being evicted at least three times by the time I was 16 years old moving every year of my life for at least 13 years. So never really had that stability other than my education with two, three public schools, my whole life, our Avenue.

Bayview High School, and when I was a high school junior, I had an organization called Urban Underground that really helped save my life. One, it taught me how to love myself, but it also taught me about my community, but also found ways to bring me outside of my community to visit different neighborhoods and different states and different communities that I never thought I that I could see myself in and it really changed my life and set this path of community organizing for myself.

And so I did some community organizing, got involved with the AmeriCorps program via Public Allies and felt that this was my calling. And when you start doing, you know, community organizing, you start seeing yourself in front of elected officials who are the decision makers in many cases. And that path veered me into getting involved in politics.

So in 2010, I got my first start. working for then United States Senator Russ Feingold as his African American statewide organizer. And then met a lot of different people and then my, my former boss uh, State Senator Nakia Dodd literally just called me out the blue and asked me to come work for her.

So I worked for her for about six years before I got bit by that bug to run for office myself.

Richie Burke: So having, having to move every year, growing up in the most incarcerated zip code in the United States, you’re clearly very successful and do a lot for the community. What, What kept you going or what really motivated you when you had to go through all that?

David Crowley: You know what, what really motivated me was actually, you know, being introduced to those different perspectives as I, as I talked about, as a, as a young person, right? And so when you go to Atlanta for the first time, you go to, you know, Los Angeles for the first time, you go to dc you go to these different places.

And, and you go back home and you wonder why don’t we have these same type of opportunities? Why aren’t African Americans who, who are in the same position of me, as I am, not struggling as much in all these different communities? And so for me, it was really about, but also I would say that. I was also encouraged to leave Milwaukee, and I always felt that that was, that didn’t sit right for me.

Richie Burke: You were encouraged to leave Milwaukee. I was encouraged

David Crowley: to leave Milwaukee. You know, if you leave Milwaukee, you can go get a good education, you can go work, and then you can come back. But I think many of us understand that when you leave your hometown, a lot of folks don’t necessarily come back. And so for me, what really kept me going was I seen many of my friends leaving for college.

I seen many of my family members leaving or my brothers leaving to, to, to join the military service to fight for this country. And for me, I felt that the fight was right here in my own backyard. And so I wanted to stay and be a part of the change that I want my kids to be able to benefit from.

Richie Burke: What, you got evicted several times, obviously not the easiest upbringing, what, what made you loyal?

Well, To this city because a lot, I, I feel like a lot of people could say, I need to get out of this, this place.

David Crowley: Well, well, you know, I mentioned like it was a struggle growing up, but the first place that I really found love, right, like love for this community was the community itself. And so when you, when I, when I think back and, and, and, and reminisce about all of my mentors, all of the individuals who helped me be where I am.

You know, for me, it was about how do I make sure that I’m living on not just my mother and my father’s legacy, but their legacy as well with all the things that they have instilled into me. And so my loyalty really came to with, came with this community saved my life. It is up to me now to give back to this same community to make sure that they can thrive themselves

Richie Burke: You have a pretty high stress job.

You’re you’re raising three children, too And it seems like you’re a big health and mental health advocate as well Are there any things that you make sure you do on a? Daily basis or try and do for yourself? Well, you, you look like you’re in good shape and have your, you know, I’m trying stuck together.

I’m trying,

David Crowley: you know. Well, you know, first I would say when it comes down to my mental health, I have to make sure that my wife’s mental health is taken care of first. Right. . That is good advice for the listeners.

Richie Burke: Yeah.

David Crowley: It’s hard to have your

Richie Burke: own health, so that’s not taken care of. Happy

David Crowley: spouse, happy house, and, and so one.

I make sure to give, you know, like my wife a particular day and there are days where I get to have to myself to have a little bit of downtime because when I come home from work, the one thing that I love about, about, about being a county executive being here is that I have the opportunity to still, you know, not only take my girls to school, but I can read them a book at night and I can still feed, you know, have dinner with them.

I mean, so. But, you know, I do like to work out. I’m an avid basketball fan, so I’m a huge Marquee Bucks fan. And I try to work out as much as possible. I’ve actually gotten to doing a little bit of yoga lately. to try to stay, to try to stay fit. and not just physically, but also mentally. You feel

Richie Burke: good walking out of there?

David Crowley: Oh, all the time. Maybe a little bit of sore, but I will tell you, when I work out in the mornings, my days are much better than they ever are when I don’t. Do you hoop at all? Oh, all the time. Try to get out to the Milwaukee Athletic Club every once in a while to hoop on some Saturdays. Yeah. Oh, yeah. We got a good group that goes out there.

Richie Burke: He’s still out there though. Good’s still out there. Good for you for still being out there at 37. I, I used to be in the Mac League and everything. I loved it. Oh really? Yeah, you know at the the aging hit me a little early with the with my legs and my hairline and I called it at About oh, man, see

David Crowley: we don’t we can’t use that excuse cuz we got it We got we got 50 plus year olds coming out there now So come on has been trying

Richie Burke: to get me to come back for four years and I think he just gave up on me He does have a submitted question in this in this episode.

for those of you who don’t know he is a renowned Millennial consultant, whatever that means, you know what that means is the county executive, you

David Crowley: know, I just thought he was a professional networker or a party or, you know, but he does great work. No one knows.

Richie Burke: Also a former Ted X Fargo, North Dakota speaker.

So we’re just, I didn’t even know that. We’re lucky, lucky to have the guy in the city. Just you know, a big time guy who the city’s managed to retain that kind of talent. I mean, that’s a That’s a good sign and speaks volumes to the work that you’re doing as county executive as well. You almost didn’t run for county executive.

Your very, very pregnant wife kind of pushed you over the edge. You told me that before we got on there. Do you mind sharing that story? I found that, I found that great. Absolutely,

David Crowley: you know, so so when I would say so I was originally what happened was that summer had just Just, just endorsed county, former county executive Chris Abiley, and, you know, I’m gearing up for the re election, everybody’s gearing up for the re election, and then out the blue, he made the decision that he was not going to run again.

And so, I started getting some phone calls, and for about two, three weeks, you know, in and out of town, doing some conferences, I’m talking to my wife. And, you know, at this time, you know, we got a baby on the way. Baby is at this, you know, autumn was actually due November 9th. And so I’m asking my wife, I’m pushing my wife.

And there was a point where my wife basically said to me if you don’t do this, we’re going to have problems. and as I was saying to you, I know she was talking about problems in the community or problems with her. but all the above, it could have been all of the above. but that was, that was the motivation.

That was the push. That was the inspiration that I needed. to, to really go out there and, and really kind of leap before I looked when you think about a seat of this magnitude. Because prior to this, I was a state representative, worked in the state capitol three years as an elected official, four years as a staffer, and also was a staffer for the Milwaukee County board at one point.

So I knew, I knew the ends and now some. And believe I could do a good job, but do we have the resources? Could we build the coalitions needed? And a few months later we won this seat. So I’m proud of the work that we have done. you know, it’s definitely challenging work, but it is, it’s so rewarding and I’m, I’m glad to be here.

Richie Burke: That’s very cool. one big thing that’s come about recently is the, the sales tax. Yes. Right. So. went from 5. 5 percent to 7. 9 percent of the city, 9 in the county. Can you, can you touch on that? How that came about and what it’s, what it’s doing?

David Crowley: Absolutely. So for Milwaukee County, we were facing a huge fiscal crisis.

So Just to backtrack a little bit, 25 years ago, we had a pension scandal and we were still paying for this pension scandal in a sense to where, you know, we have, you know, about a billion dollars in liabilities that we have to pay. We’re spending about 110 million every year just to pay for the pension and to put that in perspective.

We only collect 300 million in local property taxes, right? So a third of our property tax was just going to the pension alone because it wasn’t fixed. Nobody, nobody was fixing it. And so for us Milwaukee County was in a place where we were going to continue to have to cut all of our major services.

Whether we’re thinking about public transit, whether we think of mental health, substance abuse, housing, we will have to put all of the major programs and services that people rely on. Some of our most vulnerable residents rely on. On the chopping block. So it was either we were going to cut these services or we’re going to fight for the additional resources that we need.

And so the 0. 4 percent increase for Milwaukee County has allowed us to do many things. It is one allowed us to have the largest property tax decrease in Milwaukee County’s history. in over 20 years, it has allowed us to invest 16 million into our Milwaukee County transit system, focusing not only improvements but safety aspects for both of our operators and our passengers.

we’ve been able to invest another 4 million on top of the 12 million that we received in ARPA funds, specifically towards housing affordability. And so this has really get put us in a, in a, in a much better financial position. But I will say that this not has this hasn’t solved all of our problems So we have to make sure that we still, you know, be prudent with our taxpayer dollars But Milwaukee County is in the best fiscal position that we have been in almost three decades

Richie Burke: What would you say to people who are pushing back about the sales tax or who are not happy about the sales tax?

David Crowley: Absolutely one we I think one we have to recognize that Not everything is taxed in the state of Wisconsin. So when we think about the gas that you’re putting in your car, that’s not taxed. Our water bills are not taxed. Groceries are not taxed. So the, the, some of our most vulnerable residents will not feel the pain when it comes down to what is being taxed and what is not.

But what I will say is that If we had to shut down buses, cut routes, cut our mental health, cut our services for our courts, cut our correctional staff and our sheriff’s staff, that would have been even more detrimental. And at the end of the day, if we would have had to make these cuts, it will make Milwaukee County a much better place.

A less desirable place not a more desirable place a less desirable place to want to work live and play And so with these dollars, this is literally going to be the first time that we’re collecting tax dollars That’s going to be able to stay in our community And being investing in our community and you’re going to see the fruits of this labor.

Richie Burke: Hey everyone Thank you for tuning into this episode of milwaukee uncut and i’d like to thank our sponsor central Standard distillery. I’ve got a bottle in my hand right now. R and D batch research and development batch. These things are amazing. They’re not available in stores, but they are available at the craft house, cherry bourbon cream and apple pie bourbon cream.

I don’t even like bourbon, but I had this on ice and it was amazing. Kind of tastes like a, like a shake, but a little lighter. Put it on ice, probably put it in some hot chocolate or some coffee. I could see our friend SimGod, Michael Shepard, and his significant other, lovely significant other, P Fet, taking down a whole bottle, one of these easy over a romantic dinner at Shep Valley, so.

I recommend going to the Krafthaus and getting your hands R& D, cherry bourbon cream or apple pie bourbon cream. And if you can’t make it to the Krafthaus, if you’re outside of the Milwaukee area, but you’re still in southeast Wisconsin or, or most, a lot of places across the state now, and you’re looking to enjoy a cocktail or two, or just go on a nice bender like our Vilmo did last weekend.

Highly recommend central standard distillery. All right. Thanks for tuning into this episode of Milwaukee uncut. Let’s get back with David Crowley and it adds 184 million a year. I believe. Is that what I read? So

David Crowley: 80, it’s going to add about 80

Richie Burke: And that helps with the 31 and it’s not that bad. So if If ian abstin’s buying a 14 beer at the pfizer forum It would only jump to 14 and 34 cents,

David Crowley: right?

Well, we’re thinking about yeah in the city of milwaukee Yes, because they got the because the city needed their two percent increase and that was specific specifically for public safety and, and, and, and fire and things of that nature. So when we think about the increase, it is very nominal and, and, and even still, when you go to those, some of those major towns that I talked about, Atlanta, Denver, LA, New York.

We’re still much lower than their sales taxes on many of these places.

Richie Burke: Yeah, I saw that. I saw Chicago’s 10%, Minneapolis’s 9%. We’re only 8%. Going off that, Ian Abstin was wondering, as the county executive, do you think the Pfizer Forum should be allowed to sell beer for 14? Ha ha

David Crowley: ha ha! Well, you’re going to have to ask Peter Fagan that.

But as long as As long as we got Yanis Antetokounmpo, I’m not complaining about anything right now. I just spoke like a true politician right there. I like it. Okay.

Richie Burke: Alright, I think that’s all from the millennial consultant and TEDx speaker, Ian Abstin, today. so, going down to Three million of this goes to the parks.

I believe which need it. You can correct me if I’m wrong I think I got this off some other problem. So three million goes to the parks You’re actually decreasing property tax by a total of 21 million this year. Yeah, 16 million to the transit system 25 million in capital which goes to parks projects as well.

David Crowley: Yes, and these are all investments that we need to make I mean You know, particularly when you think about parks, right? So when we think about deferred maintenance, Milwaukee County has about a billion dollars in deferred maintenance. Now, half of that billion dollars is our public safety building, which has been crumbling.

It’s a hundred plus years old. We know that that’s one of the biggest projects that we have to tackle in the future. But the other half of that deferred maintenance is our parks, you know, making sure that we can continue to, to have our crown jewels. And so to be able to expand One, our, our parks department staff by about 18 different positions, the capital projects that you talked about.

This is going to continue to allow us to be that attractive place, a region of choice when it comes down to you know, recruiting new people to come take some of these jobs, but also making sure that we can retain the great folks that we have in Milwaukee County as well.

Mm hmm.

Richie Burke: I wanted to touch on the Brewers deal, too.

That was a hot topic over the summer. Evers signed the bipartisan ballpark, fundraising from Bill, keep the Brewers here for the next 27 years, 500 million public funding, 130 million, 7 million from the city. What’s the importance of this, and what role did you play? Play as the county executive.

David Crowley: Absolutely. So one when you think about the brewers, I mean, they’re important incredibly important economic as well as a cultural asset And so I am extremely happy that governor evers signed this huge piece of bipartisan legislation into law because it allows us to keep the brewers here but it doesn’t just do that Right.

The other thing is that milwaukee county we were able we were actually able to negotiate You know additional flexible revenue. So over the course of this lease, Milwaukee County will receive over 239 million in additional flexible spending so we can actually take care of the businesses that we want to be able to take care of.

So not only do we keep the brewers here without any additional impact on taxpayers and their dollars aren’t necessarily paying for this, but we are also getting a benefit over the course of the lease. And so for me this is a good thing for Milwaukee, you know, we have the bucks here. We don’t want to lose the brewers And and we have to remember that the brewers also bring many people outside of our community

Richie Burke: Your efforts as County Executive really focused on five main areas, behavioral mental health, public safety, affordable housing, juvenile justice, and transportation.

Can you, I don’t know if you want to give a little bit of the cliff notes on what you’re mainly focused on right now. I’m sure each one of those categories could be their own podcast, but Oh,

David Crowley: absolutely. I think we’re doing a lot. I mean, one, We talk about affordable housing, right? We, we’ve seen the largest push of affordable housing in suburban neighborhoods than we have seen in over 20, 30 years right here within Milwaukee County and really excited to have these partners at the table.

the other thing that we’re focusing on is, is mental health. We know that we have to tackle the mental health issues as well as the substance use issues within Milwaukee County. so we’ve been uh, putting online a harm reduction vending machine, so if folks need to have you know, ways to dispose their medication or be able to have some Narcan because somebody may be in a substance use crisis, those things are available to them.

we have a lot of things happening with our community reintegration center, right, where. We have a partnership with both Marquette and MATC to work with those individuals who are in our care So once they return back home, they’re much better than when they walked into the CRC So we’re doing some occupational training around welding there we have the first ever family center in the state of Wisconsin to make sure that they have the support systems That they need we’ve also increased free phone calls and video time for these individuals to, to be able to communicate with their support systems.

but as we begin to move forward, even with Juvenile Justice we’re gonna continue to invest in our Credible Messengers program, right? When we think about every young person that’s been through that program, two thirds, about 75 percent of the young people who’ve been through there hasn’t re offended and come back through our doors.

So, how do we continue to really build the capacity of all the work that we have been doing with the limited resources that we have? While also creating and building upon the relationships at both the state and federal level to bring resources back to make these incredible investments.

Richie Burke: Let’s move on to some, some quick questions.

The standard five, five ish quick questions sponsored by Central Standard Distillery. this one was not on my notes, but now that I found out you hoop at the MAC. Who is the best defender out of these three? Okay. Alex Lasry. Steven Gruber, any of the 50 year olds that you mentioned that play with you?

David Crowley: so, most of the time, me and those two guys are on the same team.

But, actually, Then you have

Richie Burke: to pick up slack for them. So, I definitely have

David Crowley: to pick up slack for them a lot of the times. But, actually, you know, the one person I would throw out there, Joe Brennan. Joe Brennan has come out there. Joe

Speaker 3: Brennan. Love that guy. Yes. GMC. GMC. Former Discovery World. Oh yeah, former DOA secretary.

He’s got some height and a little bit of girth on him. Oh man, don’t, don’t. I could see him. Don’t let his age fool you either.

David Crowley: Cause he, he, he, he. He’s out there more than me, to be honest, so.

Richie Burke: So we’re going with Joel Brennan. Joel Brennan. Much better defender than Lazzari and Gruber. Alright, I like that answer.

Next question, this one was on my notes. It’s a big year with the RNC coming to town. Likely a, maybe the most divisive and yeah, divisive election and controversial election in the history of our country, potentially. You’re a democrat. What are your views on the RNC coming into Milwaukee? I

David Crowley: think everybody understands that the road to the presidency comes through Milwaukee County in the state of Wisconsin.

So we know that all eyes are going to be on Milwaukee. And when it comes down to the RNC, You know, it is our job to make sure that they have the greatest party that they can have and make sure that they are safe as well. But I truly believe that this is a great opportunity for our entire region. when you think about our businesses and our workers, this is a great opportunity for them to showcase what they can do.

And because we know so many people are going to be watching the Republican National Convention. This is, this is the time for us to be in the spotlight, to really show what we have to offer to help attract more conferences, seminars, whatever you can name right here to the Milwaukee area. And I think it’s going to, it’s going to be great.

And I’m, I’m reminded of, you know, the, the Bucks run, right. And we had the opportunity to do the championship and the parade. And the following year we had the Red Bull flu talk right here at veterans park within the city of Milwaukee. And we was wondering like, how did they find Milwaukee? And they were watching the Bucks parade and seeing the Veterans Park and say, we think we need to go there.

So it really gives us an opportunity to shine. And I truly believe with, you know, everything that happened with the Democratic National Committee convention, because it wasn’t able to go on the way it needed to go on because of the pandemic. This gives us a redo in a sense to really showcase all the great things that we have to offer as a community.

So you

Richie Burke: look at it from more of a bipartisan standpoint. Good for the city. Good publicity. Oh, absolutely. It’s not about red or blue. It’s about the green. Some people are not looking forward to all the Trumpsters coming to town and things like that. Well,

David Crowley: you know, I think there are going to be a lot of folks who are going to have their popcorn ready for all of this.

But, you know, no. It’s not about red or blue. It’s about the green for Milwaukee.

Richie Burke: I like that. I’m going to create a clip of that. What would you say the biggest, if you could narrow it down to one issue, what would you say the biggest issue Milwaukee faces right now is?

David Crowley: The biggest issue. you know, I think that there are a lot of things that we can name, right?

But the one thing that I would throw out there is, is, is unity. and the reason why I say unity is I’ve traveled and had the opportunity to meet people who come from the Milwaukee area. And it’s, and it’s always interesting to me when I am, I’m, I’m somewhere and somebody said, Oh yeah, I grew up in the Milwaukee area.

And I was like, Oh, where you live? It was like, Shorewood. It’s like, that’s Milwaukee, right? That’s Milwaukee County. Like, you know, and so I say unity because a lot of the times we forget that we are one county. And we always want to pin the city of Milwaukee versus our suburbs. But if our suburbs are doing well, that means our city is doing well.

And if our city is doing well, that means our suburbs are doing well. And I believe that for the county as well. And so, So when we can get our businesses, we can get our union members, when we can get the business leaders, Republicans and Democrats to understand who we are and what our goals are as a Milwaukee community, I think that will help us out politically economically as well.

And so I will always say that the unity that we need is, is, is on the horizon. I will say that when you think about all the work that we’ve been able to do, but I will say that is the biggest issue. and not just unity within Milwaukee County and our little municipalities. But even partnerships across the state, right?

We are the economic engine of this state and it’s hard to say that without feeling like i’m beating my chest But we do this in partnership with other communities. We do this in partnership with the walsall with the lacrosse with the green bay because they have things that we don’t have and our people go there like their people come here And so it’s really about, I would say, creating, creating even stronger partnerships is something that we should be focusing on.

Richie Burke: What is your favorite thing to do in Milwaukee? Go to a Bucks game. I enjoy that too. I’ll be there on Saturday. I’ll

David Crowley: be there Saturday as well. That’s going to be a good one. Maybe I’ll see

Richie Burke: you there. Favorite Milwaukee restaurant? Do you have one? Go

David Crowley: to spot. Ah some estate guy. I love carnivore.

Carnivore is probably one of my favorite steak place. but if I’m not at carnivore, my, my wife loves pasta. And so she always wants to go to the Calderon club. Nice. So those, those are my two

Speaker 3: favorites. I guess, you know, Eric Kennedy. Who doesn’t know Eric? Hashtag breaking bread. I guess. I appreciate it, Eric.

Good dude. Really good dude. Milwaukee’s boyfriend, Eric Kennedy. What are you most proud of over the last four years? I mean, personally,

David Crowley: I just have to say my girls. You know My girls are just amazing. The amount of time watching them grow up, seeing them become the young women that they are has been Just absolutely fantastic to watch

Richie Burke: and final question why have you chosen to stay in Milwaukee and then raise your family here?

David Crowley: Well, where else would I go? This is the best place in the state of Wisconsin on earth I mean one just regionally right like when I think about Milwaukee There’s not too many communities like Milwaukee of this size that this great And it’s right next to a lake, one of the largest freshwater fresh bodies of water in the entire world.

I mean, we have so many things to offer. I don’t care where you’re coming from in this entire world. Milwaukee has something for you. Whether you talk about the German heritage, the African heritage, the Italian heritage, our Asian heritage, we have something for everybody. I mean, And we have some of the best summers, and I think when people come to Milwaukee and experience a summer here, they’re like, we didn’t even know this place existed.

We have the most accessible beach in the entire country, possibly the world. We got music festivals, ethnic festivals that are happening all across this city on any given summer, summer day. And so, there’s nothing short to do here. And it, it mind boggles me when people say, well, there’s not nothing to do here.

And I’m like, Are you living under a rock? There’s a lot of things to do in this city and in this County. So

Richie Burke: County Executive, David Crowley, thank you for coming on today.

Speaker 3: Well, I appreciate you. This was fun. And for all you do for the community. Thank you.

Richie Burke: Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Milwaukee Uncut, sponsored by our friends at Central Standard Distillery in partnership with On Milwaukee and produced by Storymark Studios.

If you enjoyed this episode, if you think someone else should know what’s on tap for the city of Milwaukee this year, please share this episode with them. That helps us get more ears on this podcast and make sure to subscribe. Cause we’ve got a great lineup coming up. Thanks again.

Dr Raymond Prior: How to Perform like the Top .1%

Dr Raymond Prior: How to Perform like the Top .1%

The final episode of our series with Dr Raymond Prior to help you crush 2024 is on a variety of topics.

The final episode of our series with Dr Raymond Prior to help you crush 2024 is on a variety of topics. In this episode we cover: 

  • 2:05-  Habits of high performance of the top .1% 
  • 10:15-  How to get effective sleep and the importance of sleep 
  • 22:00 – Caffeine: How it actually works, how to use it and what NOT to do
  • 32:30 – Creating the best diet for you 
  • 36:10 – The importance of mindfulness to performance and how to start 

 

Follow Milwaukee Uncut on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/milwaukeeuncut/

Milwaukee Uncut is produced by Story Mark Studios: https://storymarkstudios.com/

Sponsored by Central Standard Distillery: https://thecentralstandard.com/

In Partnership with OnMilwaukee: https://onmilwaukee.com/


Transcript

Dr. Raymond Prior: Most people’s lives would be significantly improved devoting eight hours to sleep every night and trying to get as close to the same sleep schedule As you could so one of the things about a cold plant is it will Decrease inflammation don’t know if it was an actual study or something on the internet.

Richie Burke: But yeah, that is , not true at all Hey everyone, welcome back to milwaukee uncut sponsored by central standard distillery produced by story mark studios and in partnership With on milwaukee, this is our final episode of our series of Three with Dr. Raymond Pryor, feel free to go back and listen to the last two.

If you have not already after this one, he’s one of the most sought after performance consultant in the world. Works with a lot of professional athletes, Olympians, executives, Grammy winners, Emmy winners. He is great at what he does. And this episode is all about optimizing your life. This may be the longest episode that we’ve ever posted, at least in a long time.

I thought about breaking it up, but instead. There are timestamps in the show notes. So if you do want to skip ahead to a certain section, I think all the episodes, all the information is great information, but feel free to skip ahead. You can just go to the episode description and there are timestamps in the episode.

The topics we cover are habits of high performers, how to get the best sleep possible, how much sleep you actually need to be getting and the importance of sleep. Caffeine talk a bunch about caffeine. Ray blew my mind. With this section. Apparently I’ve been doing things wrong for my whole life and there’s a good chance you’ve been too.

We also talk about dieting and mindfulness. So a lot of great topics on today’s episode, before we dive in, I want to say thank you for all the recent support. The show has been getting a lot of traction, especially on our Instagram accounts, to make sure you’re following us on there, there’s a lot of great clips from the guests.

And if you do leave a review on Apple, Apple podcasts and put your email or Instagram handle in the review. We will reach out and send you something to show our appreciation that helps the show. All right, let’s dive in with dr. Raymond Pryor two caveats before we dive into this conversation. The first is very very few Really high performers are optimizing anything For example, work with a couple of pro hockey players they Like, they’ll probably wake up, depending on the travel schedule.

Dr. Raymond Prior: Let’s just say it’s a home schedule, just for the sake of the argument. Probably wake up at about 8am for morning skate. They then go eat. all the body work they need to do, whether it’s seeing the trainer, getting a massage, doing whatever. Some of them have a yoga routine where it was basically just like, what do I got to do to take care of my body today?

Then they’re going to have a, usually a video session, something in the afternoon where they’re meeting with the team. They’re talking about the game, doing whatever. Okay. Then there’s usually another meal. They’re probably then in the locker room playing cards or video games for a little bit because it’s too far to go home, you know, or not enough time to go home and come back.

Then they do, you know, warm up, whatever. Then you then play your game, which you’re just getting wrecked during that game, even if you’re a third liner. Like, playing five minutes of an NHL hockey game is just a full on beatdown. Then they have their post game usually like interviews and all that stuff, then they work out and then they go home and they’re still so jacked up from the day.

They’re probably not falling asleep till three or four in the morning. Right? So in this scenario, eating schedule is not totally optimized. Body care, certainly not optimized workout, not optimized sleep, not optimized. So as much as I think the word optimization is a bit of a buzzword now, Optimization is not required for high performance, nor are most high performers optimizing most things, okay?

There are some examples where you might see that. For example, equipment is really easy to optimize, but in terms of like, what we’re getting from ourselves in these scenarios, it’s not always the case. So, and with that, the other caveat that I would add is, seeing really, really high performers, It would be a misconception or a myth to think that they all have really high performing habits, or that they are not performing well in spite of a few things that are Perhaps self imposed and getting in their own way, right?

Many people who are really high performers do indeed experience some significant anxiety sometimes some depression They don’t all have the best like i’ve been to the olympics and been in the athlete village before I promise you They’re not all eating super clean most of them are not sleeping as well as they could some of them are probably drinking and not eating the ways they could so I would Many high performers are not all of them are so i’ll just put that as a bit of a caveat to our conversation.

Having said that, what I would say about the highest performers and the most consistent performers that I’ve seen, one of the things, the common threads between them, there are a couple and I’ll speak more from the psychological standpoint because that’s more my expertise than anything else. The first is they have a habit of being present a lot more than not.

It’s not that they don’t ever think about the past, because if you don’t, it’s very difficult to learn. It’s not that they don’t ever think about the future, because if you’re not planning for the future and deciding what you, what future you want to move toward, it’s very difficult to actually do that.

But they have a tendency that when it’s time to be present or most valuable to be present, they know how to do it, and they’re not leaving it up to chance that hopefully I’m present at the time when I need to be present. Most of them are pretty good about taking care of their body. they are listening to, you know, for example, on the PJ Tour and LPJ Tour, I would say the highest performers are not the people that are hitting the most amount of golf balls.

They’re the people who are hitting the amount of golf balls that is best for them that day, which might mean none at all some days and might mean just a couple. It also, there might be days when it’s quite a bit, but they’re very picky and choosy about where they put their focus, their time, their energy.

And then another common thread is that the highest performers, don’t get me wrong, they want to win. They want to win. All the time, they want to win big, and they want to make a lot of money and do all the things that come with that along the way. They are far more disproportionately intrinsically motivated.

They are motivated far more by their craft, than they are the byproducts of it. Now, don’t get me wrong, they enjoy them, but those that I would say are the highest performing, the thing itself is the primary motivator for them, not all the extra stuff that comes with it. Because again, you’ll. Those things won’t carry you through the times that are really hard and they won’t even carry you through the times that are really good, not for very long.

So those would be some of the common threads that I’ve noticed for sure. And for those who didn’t listen to our goal setting episode, we go pretty deep into intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and the importance of setting goals that you’re intrinsically motivated by or just the likelihood that you’re going to achieve those over a long span of time.

Richie Burke: So we won’t go too in depth on this episode, but make sure to go back and listen to that one of you. Have not already in on the flip side, I’m sure you’ve worked with a number of people or witnessed a lot of people who are maybe full of potential, whether it was in the business world or in the in the sports world or music world who had loads of potential and talent, but did not live up to that.

Dr. Raymond Prior: And what do you see on the flip side? A little bit of, you might say, kind of a mirror opposite. So first of all, I would say that one of the, which we might talk about here in a bit or in another episode. That what’s really, really predictive of people’s trajectory of their growth is whether they have a fixed or a growth mindset.

That’s a really strong predictor. And with those tend to come a variety of different behaviors and habits that tend to facilitate performance or perhaps start to limit it. We can get into that in another episode. But I would say people who have a lot of ability but have a really difficult time tapping into it, one of the common threads is They use outcomes to determine how confident they need to be.

Like if I make this sale, then I’ll feel confident that I can make another sale. Or if I hit it, have a good score in this round, then I’ll feel like I can play well enough in another. And what starts to happen is they start to become dependent upon outcomes. The limitation to this is we can’t control outcomes.

By definition, outcomes exist in the past and the future, not the present. So once even an outcome that has just happened, by definition, as soon as it happens, it’s over. So we don’t have control of them. They are not in the present. And what happens is if I need them in order to feel confident, my threshold for confidence gets lower because it used to be, well, I had to do is hit one good golf shot or have one good sale.

Well, now I need to, now I need three. So here again, we see the shelf life and the building tolerance to these that starts to make my confidence less stable as it goes on. So if your primary means of Being confident is produce outcomes or past success that tends to be a very fragile model at the top levels of sport where if you’re not playing with confidence more consistently, you’re cutting off access to your own ability.

It’s another way of saying anxiety for many people. And then what we’re seeing now, too, there’s just a mountain of research that shows that if you’re not sleeping enough, Consistently enough, your brain and body just do not have the capacity to be able to keep up with people who are. Mm hmm. And we’ll dive into that more on the growth mindset episode as well as stable confidence versus unstable confidence, which it seems like unstable is when you’re reliant on Outcomes and external factors and what you’ve done where stable confidence, so you can be more in the moment and as much more effective.

Internally driven, internally driven. Okay. speaking of, I want to run down a list of about seven. You can call them habits or the things that people can do to optimize or maximize performance. You brought up sleep. What’s your take on it? How important is it? Yeah, it’s not my take. I can just tell you what the research tells us that essentially anything less than seven hours of sleep a night is by definition sleep deprivation. as I mentioned in the previous episode, everything about us, physically, psychologically, emotionally, neurologically, our immune system, our nervous system, our hormone release, all of those are regulated during our sleep. So if we are not sleeping enough, you know, think about us human beings. We’re kind of we’re kind of like batteries we have like a battery.

We have a recycle rate or a refresh rate that is by definition, the amount of time it takes for us after sleeping to diminish our focus and energy to the point of deficiencies. And for us as human beings, it’s somewhere between 12 and 16 hours. Which means we need eight hours of sleep. Like we could do a whole episode on sleep.

The research around it and how it impacts our mental health, our physical health, our performance our focus, our immune health, our ability to battle things like cancer are, it’s indisputable. And the hard part right now is that culturally we tend to have this attitude of like, I’ll sleep when I die, or I like to burn the candle at both ends or you know, sleep is for the weak.

And the bottom line is the research shows the exact opposite. You know, for example, if I, if I sleep deprived you for a full day, Like just a, you know, you pull an all nighter. You would be far better off being well beyond the legal limit of intoxication doing your job than you would be if you were sleep deprived.

And the idea that we can operate on low sleep is a process that sleep scientists call baseline resetting, where we just get used to operating on less than optimal sleep levels, optimal again or near optimal. And even though we think we’re doing okay relative to what we could be, we are not. And for those of you who are like, no, I can, I can do just fine on less than a full night’s sleep, a full night being eight hours devoted to sleep.

If you took the number of people in the world who can operate on less than seven hours of sleep without deficiency, and you rounded it to the nearest whole number and expressed it as a percent, that number is zero. So there’s essentially a genetic anomaly that allows some people to operate on less than eight hours of sleep, and it’s by definition zero percent of people.

Richie Burke: One thing I did want to ask you, and I’ve, I’ve, don’t know if it was an actual study or something on the internet, but I saw it where it was like, What’s important is you get, you know, seven or eight hours, an average of seven or eight hours of sleep over a week. It doesn’t matter if you get 15 one night and three the next.

Okay. Yeah, that is not true at all. in fact there’s a thing that most people, that I know I was particularly familiar with this when I was younger, we call this either localized or social jet lag. Which is, I sleep, this sleep schedule, Sunday night through Thursday. But then Friday through Sunday or Thursday through whatever, I sleep a different one.

the more you are shifting your sleep schedule, there’s another way of saying slip, shifting your circadian rhythm, which is your internal sleep and wake clock, the more you shift it, the worse your sleep is gonna be, the less depth of sleep you get, and the deeper our sleep is, the more recovery we get, and the more you’re disrupting your ability to get the full amount.

The bottom line is if, if most people’s lives would be significantly improved devoting eight hours of sleep. Devoting eight hours to sleep every night and trying to get the same as close to the same sleep schedule as you could That would be but but the idea that you can sleep a ton on the weekend to make up for being sleep deprived all week Is not true.

Not accurate. Okay, it is not but you’re aware of people saying that I am aware that there are there are a Variety of different and this could go for any topic by the way, not just sleep, but When it comes to sleep the research around it is really important because it often dispels a variety of these myths that we tend to think are true, but really are not.

There was one, I know someone emailed me a while ago asking, well, I need to get eight hours of sleep at a time. Could I just take like 15 minute naps? Like once every hour, I’ve heard of that too. Or like four hours of sleep. Yeah, it is. Please do not for anyone listening, please do not do that. It is not good whatsoever.

So if you understand sleep. And again, this could be an episode all itself, but the bottom line is there’s a reason that we need to devote eight hours of sleep at a single time to it. And you can’t just break it up over the day. And that’s because our, we sleep in cycles of varying depths. And if you’re only sleeping 15 minutes at a time, it is not enough time to get into both the full range of sleep for an extended period of time.

Now that’s not to say that taking a nap every now and then isn’t helpful. There’s a bunch of research that says that it is. But if your sleep schedule is, I’ll get two hours here, 15 minutes here, 12 here, you are not getting anywhere near the sleep that you really need to get. Got it. quick, any tips for people to get better sleep?

Yeah, a variety of them. So first and foremost, the strongest predictor of good sleep is devoting eight hours to sleep per night as on as close to the same sleep schedule as you can. Now, again, I’m not a purist on almost anything, and there are life demands and performance demands that don’t always allow that.

We often as human beings sacrifice sleep in order to do certain things. I want to get up early to go do something, or I’m going to go do something on the weekend that’s going to require me to stay up later. But the closer you can be to sleeping on the same schedule that devotes at least eight hours to sleep every night.

The better your sleep is going to be. Your brain will start to want to fall asleep at that time and want to wake up on it as the more you do that. another thing people can do in the morning our brains are the primary external signal for waking and sleeping for us as human beings is light, specifically sunlight.

So in the morning far people would be far better off instead of Jumping out and just drinking a cup of coffee would be actually go outside and get direct sunlight Now you don’t need to go look at the sun itself But just being outside and being exposed to sunlight. There’s a part of our brain It’s called the suprachiasmatic nucleus Which is just a big fancy latin word for saying thing that gets light from the sky and tells our brain to wake up You That thing when it gets exposed to light through our eyes essentially it starts our waking and it also helps to time sleep.

So it goes, Oh, we’re awake now, the light. So it goes, now we’re going to be awake. And in this many hours, we need to start getting ready to sleep. So it times our sleep clock. Similarly in the evening. So if you were going to be around like sunset, so we would call this low sky sunlight. If you go out, like perhaps you can go walk your dog or do something, just go outside for five to 10 minutes.

as the sun is setting. That starts to, it starts to almost like double check our sleep clock and it also makes our eyes less sensitive to light for the rest of the evening, which pushes us toward sleep. there are a variety of other things that people can do. Your sleeping conditions matter if they’re too hot.

So the internal regulator for our sleep is body temperature. Body temperature, like all of our organs don’t always necessarily speak the same language, you know? So the way that a liver enzyme would communicate might be different than how like a neuro neuron might communicate with the neurons next to it. body temperature is the universal language for us internally. So if I took your body temperature and turned it up enough, you would be awake. If I turned it down enough, like if I could just dial it, you would fall asleep. So we want, okay. are to essentially to help push us towards sleep. We want to move our body temperature down and then keep it down while we’re sleeping.

This is why if it’s too hot under covers, you might wake up cause you’ve like kicked off all your covers because your body’s like, this is just too hot to sleep. So the two things you can do first is take about a three to five minute hot shower. before bed, like half hour, 45 minutes before. What that actually does is it increases our core body temperature.

And then our nervous system snaps back by going, this is too hot. And it releases all that heat through a process of vasodilation, which is essentially means like through our skin and it’ll drop our body temperature by about a degree or a degree and a half. And that’s all we need to start to move us towards sleep.

And then in our actual sleep conditions, assuming like we might call normal sleep attire, shirt, t shirts, jammies, whatever. You’re going to want your sleeping conditions to be about 65 degrees, maybe a little bit cooler, right about in there. Of course, you can wear covers and do whatnot and you want it to be really dark and quiet.

And if you can do those things, you’ll be giving yourself a good chance to sleep pretty well. There are a variety of other things that you can do too. I would also recommend to people cutting off caffeine at about, assuming you go to bed at about. again, well, whatever your bedtime is, go back 10 hours and cut off caffeine from there.

Caffeine has a really long chemical half life, which means it takes a long time for it to wear off. And so if you’re drinking caffeine at three, four in the afternoon, It has a very good chance of keeping you from falling asleep, which means you’re not going to sleep very well, and then you’re going to need more caffeine the next day, and then I lean on the caffeine.

It becomes a cycle where, like, I drink more and more caffeine to cover up for the fact that I’m not sleeping well and feel tired, and that’s keeping me from getting the sleep that I really need to feel more energized. And the other part, for anybody out there who’s like, well, I could drink a cup of coffee and just go right to bed.

There are many people that that is the case. But one of the things that caffeine does is not just keep us from falling asleep, for most people, but for almost all people, it keeps us from getting very deep sleep, which is the sleep where we feel most recovered. And so even if you could drink coffee and just fall asleep, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re getting very deep sleep.

Richie Burke: Good depth of sleep. So the more you can limit that particularly in the afternoons, the, the more you’ll be teeing yourself up to be getting a good night’s sleep and feel tired enough to, to go to sleep. And I’m guessing limiting social media and screens before sleep is very important. Yeah.

Dr. Raymond Prior: Especially scrolling social media. There’s a, there’s a big trend right now of people buying like blue blocker glasses, like the blue light tends to be the type of light that keeps us awake. But if you could, you know, if everyone in the world, like an hour, hour and a half before they went to bed turned off screens and picked up a book or just spoke with the people around them in, you know, dimmer light, they would have an easier time falling asleep.

Like the screens, not there’s two things they do. The first is there’s light in our eyes, which communicates waking to our brain. And the other is, is that it’s like it’s active, really active thinking in a way that reading and conversing isn’t. And that oftentimes also keeps us awake. So what keeps us awake at night is either our nervous system is upregulated enough, meaning it’s.

wanting to be awake and our own thoughts. So if I give myself something worth thinking about, it’s communicating to my brain, this is worth staying awake for. And if my nervous system is upregulated, which oftentimes means my body temperature is higher than it would be if I was sleeping, that will also keep us awake.

I want to move to caffeine. You gave some good advice to cut it off 10 hours beforehand. I’ve also heard it’s bad to take right when you. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just not actually doing anything for you. Expand on that. Yeah, so caffeine is an adenosine antagonist. Adenosine is this chemical in our bloodstream that, when we are sleeping, it clears it out.

And as soon as we wake, it starts to build, like, think of it like a river flow, or even like a, you had an hourglass, and if you flipped it over, like, the sand starts falling, so sleep flips the glass for us. So in the morning, our adenosine levels, or we might, if you were looking at this from very scientific terminology, we call it sleep pressure, our sleep pressure is at its lowest.

We’ve just slept, so the sleep has remove the adenosine levels or reset them so they’re at their lowest point. What wakes us in the morning is a burst of cortisol. It’s kind of the last, there’s many things that kind of kick us toward waking, but the last is a burst of cortisol, which is another way of saying adrenaline.

So what wakes us in the morning and gets us moving at first is our adrenal system. Our adenosine system hasn’t even really kicked in yet. It’s at its lowest flow. And so if you’re drinking coffee in the morning, what caffeine does is it goes into our brain and it binds to the sites where adenosine would normally bind to, right?

So think of it like it parks in the parking spot for adenosine. And so it’s blocking it. If, you know, again, if you’re using the hourglass analogy, it just levels, like it just cuts off the sand flow. Well, in the morning when we first wake up, which about the first 90 minutes, there’s really no adenosine flowing.

And so if you’re drinking coffee, that caffeine is indeed parking in those spots, but there’s the adenosine is not trying to park there to begin with because there’s not enough. So if I wait 90 minutes or two hours from waking, when my adenosine levels are actually starting to flow. When I drink that caffeine, it then actually blocks a larger flow of adenosine.

So it’s actually, I’m actually getting the waking effects of caffeine. And then what that also does is the ripple effect of that is, because I have blocked that flow later in the day, I’m far less likely to experience the afternoon crash. Where if I drink caffeine right away, it’s not blocking anything.

So I’m really not getting the waking benefits to begin with. And then because it’s not by the time that caffeine starts to wear off, now it’s starting to really flow and I get that afternoon crash. And then oftentimes then what we do as well, then I better drink caffeine then, and then now I’m drinking caffeine late in the afternoon.

That is then probably disrupting my ability to go to sleep later on. question, what if you work out really early in the morning? Like, you get up and you essentially, you’re at the gym a half hour after you’re awake. Or is that, or should you wait, ideally wait a little longer to go to the gym? Like, whether you’re working out or whether you’re just sitting around your adenosines.

At its lowest level. So if you drank that, if you pound a bunch of pre-workouts, much, much, if you drank a bunch of, of caffeine right before you worked out, if it’s within the first 90 minutes of waking it, if you felt any waking effects, it’d be more placebo effect than anything else. Interesting. Okay.

You’d be far better off just working out. So exercise increases core body temperature and promotes waking for us. So. You know, even my morning routine is essentially like the dog goes out, dog gets fed, I do my mindfulness routine, then I go straight to working out, I come back, I tend to like, I got some emails and stuff before I have sessions and meetings start for the day, and then I don’t have my, I have a cup of coffee every day, usually right about two hours after I wake up.

After the workout. After the workout. It does feel really good after the workout. It’s actually doing something for you. Okay, that would make sense. Thank you for explaining this to me after 35 years of not really Caffeine is the second most traded commodity in the world. Behind oil. But one of the least understood about how it works for people and if you understand how it works You can get more out of it You know, I even had a friend who they asked me about it Not that i’m bragging but I was like, well, this is how denison works and your sleep works and over a year she spent like many hundreds of dollars less on starbucks because the one that she was buying didn’t have to turn into three for the day, so Hey everyone, it’s your host ritchie burke.

Richie Burke: Thank you for listening to this episode of milwaukee uncut I highly recommend all of Ray’s advice and tips if you are looking to optimize your life The guy clearly knows what he’s talking about. So continue listening I also want to take a minute to thank the sponsor our friends over at central standard distillery And I know this is an episode on optimization, but sometimes You are just looking for a different kind of optimization.

For example, if you’re ben anderson I would add Joe Katz or if you’re Sam God, Michael Shepard coming down the back nine looking to break 87 over at the Wisconsin club. And in those kind of circumstances. I’d recommend a little bit of central standard. I even use it in some tournaments, a little door county, cherry vodka and electrolytes to maintain a quick first step and stay light on my feet out there.

But anyway, central standard on a serious note, a lot of great people over there and. They do have some healthy options if you are putting Ray’s advice into action, which I do for the majority of my life or the majority of my time. They’ve got some great mocktails over at the craft house, some awesome salads.

And if you’re listening to this in the summer months, I know it’s January while we’re recording this, but in the summer months, I don’t know if there’s a better place to hang out with friends or enjoy a drink than the, the rooftop just outside of the third ward, amazing views and atmosphere. Out there and in the craft house, make sure to check out our friends central standard distillery.

All right Let’s get back to today’s episode with dr. Raymond prior That makes sense. speaking of ways to wake up. I want to touch on cold plunging. It’s something that I reluctantly tried in may going in lake michigan and then got hooked on it because I felt great afterwards Can you? And now my, my morning routine is basically stumble out of bed straight into a cold shower for like a minute or two and then go work out opposed to pumping a bunch of caffeine in my system, which I’ve done for years when I, right when I wake up, but I won’t be doing anymore.

Dr. Raymond Prior: can you touch on cold exposure? Yeah. Cold. There’s a bunch of research around it now. It started off pretty Pretty small, but the sample sizes in the studies are confirming what the early studies showed, even though they were smaller samples. But essentially what it is, so again, our dopaminergic system works like a scale between pleasure and pain.

When we just go straight to pleasure, we get a longer, deeper snapback of pain, which is why, like scrolling through social media in the morning, the first thing if you wake up tends to make people feel kind of crappy throughout the day. Okay. Cold exposure to us is painful. Like it doesn’t feel very good.

Some people learn to kind of like it, but ultimately like it doesn’t feel great for us. So it tips our nervous system scale, our dopaminergic scale toward pain first. So when we sit in it, and again, you don’t need to get it to the point that you’re frostbitten or anything like that. But if you’re sitting in uncomfortably cold water and it doesn’t have to be water but that’s the one of the more easy ones to get access to because it’s either a shower or a cold you know cold plunges are becoming very popular these days ice bath whatever so two things happen one it tips our scale toward pain first Then we get this longer, deeper snap back again, cause that’s how our nervous system is designed, which produces for us these kind of longer and spiked levels of norepinephrine, which is just adrenaline and dopamine, which just another way of saying energy and focus throughout the day.

And that’s why if you did a cold plunge for three minutes, it will suck while you’re in it, but you will feel better afterward. It’s the same process of how it works for exercise. Except it’s just a really, it’s a, it’s a more of a shock to our nervous system than perhaps a long time on a treadmill.

You could do it by doing 30 minutes on a treadmill, or you could do it in two or three minutes. So you can do both and many people do both. Yeah, I do. But it’s a really safe and healthy and more effective means of waking because the second thing it does is it pushes our core temperature down. So our nervous system snaps back by increasing it.

Increasing temperature is just another way of saying more waking regarding cold plunging. I I’d say the effects of that Lasts much longer for me than exercising if I do a good one I actually like go in the lake michigan when it’s 55 degrees in there. It’s cold You get you get quite the kickback. Yeah, and for the people wondering like how much time Research basically shows that it’s It’s a total of 11 minutes a week, so that you could do all at once, or you could space it out into smaller amounts.

I usually do three to four per week, so I don’t do it every single day. And then the other caveat with that, for those who are working out, you’re going to want to do that before you work out, not after. So one of the things about a cold plunge is it will, decrease inflammation, which sounds really good, but you have to keep in mind our inflammation process is, or response is what helps our muscles and tissues heal and grow.

So when you’re working out, it’s breaking down your muscles and it’s creating damn micro damage to them. And then it rebuilds stronger. So if I do cold exposure after it disrupts, protein synthesis, and it disrupts anabolic processes, which means it keeps them from repairing and growing. And so if you’re gonna do your cold exposure, you want to keep it before your workout’s, not after.

Particularly for those who are trying to build muscular strength, it feels good before workout. You just kind of, I feel like I better and I move better. Well, and that dose of norepinephrine and dopamine is gonna make your workout feel better. So, I mean, when I have my hardest workouts, I am a hundred percent doing a cold shower before I go do them.

Richie Burke: Let’s talk about dieting. Actually, I’d like to give my dad a quick shout out. He took a 14 second cold shower yesterday. Good for him. 14 seconds is a good start. JB. First time in there. so I want to talk about diet. There’s a ton of, there’s a million diets out there. what, what do you advise as far as like eating clean goes to people?

Dr. Raymond Prior: Yeah, this one’s a little bit beyond my scope. Do you want to skip this one? I just, well, I’ll give, I’ll give some basics and it’s different for everyone. And again, I’m not a purist and the research that I have read around our caloric intake and whatnot is. It’s pretty straightforward in terms of the general parameters.

Now it can look a little bit different for different people. But the bottom line is staying away from fried foods, processed foods, really sugary foods, like kind of all the basics. Those things for us, not only are they empty calories, but they increase ongoing inflammation. We do want an inflammation response, but not ongoing.

Because that, essentially what it does is it stretches the vasculature in our body, and without it being able to not be stressed for a while and recover, it’s essentially the formula for like, cardiorespiratory disease. Right. So, fruits and veggies lean meats, and making sure that you are not, overeating portions, again, depending on what it is you’re trying to do.

So again, I’m trying to paint with a broad brush here, but a lot of people overeat portions here in the United States. Yeah, we have a tendency to do that. I’m my wife and I went out to eat a little while ago and we have actually moved toward a policy of we order an appetizer and then we share an entree.

Richie Burke: Bre and I do that. Yeah, because we used to get a appetizer and then our own entrees and we, there’d either be too much food to finish or we’d finish it. And I’d be like, I. Grossly overeat. I can’t move. Right. Portion consciousness is important. Again, eating is a source of dopamine for us, which is why if we eat really fast, the enzymes in our liver and in our gut don’t quite move fast enough to tell us you’re full until after we are beyond full.

And if you’re using food to, feel good. Not just I like the taste of it. And for sustenance that it can obviously become kind of a weight issue and a health issue. But ultimately what I would encourage people when it comes to diet is you don’t need to eat like an Olympian or how we think Olympians typically eat in order to be healthier.

If you improve like our sleep, if you improve by 20%, 30%, 50 percent that compounds over time in a really significant way. So let’s say You’re like, well, I’m really hungry, but you can cut your portions down by a third consistently. That makes a huge difference. You know, like the analogy that we used to use in grad school when we were talking about adherence to diet was like, imagine you have somebody who eats a cookie a day.

Well, it doesn’t seem like a lot, but I feel like, well, what if that person ate half a cookie a day? When you’re talking like the difference between like 300 and more cookies versus a hundred and like, that’s a lot. And then you think about how much we typically eat, it’s, it’s way more. So it depends on what you’re doing, you know, not everybody’s trying to cut calories or watch their weight, but for eating, again, the basic guidelines are the ones that tend to take control.

And then now we oftentimes have people who have different food allergies and stuff. So it might be important for people to talk to somebody who’s more informed than I am, like a nutritionist or a dietitian or something like that. The one last thing I wanted to talk about was mindfulness and that’s importance and what you recommend for, for people.

Sure. let’s define mindfulness for those listening. mindfulness is a fancy way of saying Attention or awareness, but it’s a very specific type of awareness. It’s built on three elements. element one is what we might call intention, which basically means it’s a proactive awareness.

Everything about us for human beings, the first line of information processing is awareness. Like even if I’m been on this couch like coughing, what tells me I need to cough is I become aware that my throat is dry or something of that nature, or I become aware that I need to eat because I become aware that I’m feeling hungry, right?

So awareness of things is what allows us to go, Oh, well then what do I want to do about it? Now, certainly, A lot of our pro, our reactive awareness is really valuable, but if you’re trying to thrive, having a more proactive awareness where you can be aware of something before it might think something might play out or as it’s playing out would certainly be more valuable than after.

So intention is the first pillar. So the second pillar is acceptance. Acceptance in this case means I can feel something. I can think something. I can be aware of it as it is without me needing to change it to something else. What that might look like is I’m paying attention to perhaps I’m feeling anxiety.

So I’m proactive with that by paying attention to, Hmm, I’m noticing I’m feeling anxious. The acceptance part is like, okay, I’m feeling anxious. I don’t need to try to jump out of this feeling. I don’t need to try to turn it off or I need to fix it. Like I can just be anxious, right? And what this does, it’s allows us to sit in discomfort long enough where our brain and body don’t start to see it as something that is a problem, right?

It can just be a thought, can just be a feeling without it being a fact. You know, you could have a thought that is something like, well, what happens if I jerk this tee shot left? Well, a mindful. accepting response to that would be, well, that’s just a thought about what might happen in the future. It’s not a certainty.

It’s not a fact or a precursor to the future, right? Or I’m worried about an interview that I have tomorrow. Well, that worry is just about, about the future, not the thing itself. And the last one pillar of mindfulness is groundedness. Groundedness is another way of saying being present. So in our current experience, not trying to jump out of it and escape it or focus on things that aren’t actually happening in the moment.

Where mindfulness practices come in is it trains us to start to pay attention to things both internally and externally through these three pillars, meaning I’m going to pay attention to more things on purpose. and proactively, as they are, not what I wish they were or think they should be. And I’m not necessarily going to treat my thoughts and feelings as facts, simply because they exist.

In which case, then I’m not being dragged around by them, simply because they exist. And I’m going to be present more often. And again, on a neurological level, being mindful is really important to us because even in uncomfortable states, is a high dopaminergic state for us. So the more present we are, the happier we’re gonna be.

There’s actually a variety of studies that show people who are present more often are happier, healthier, higher functioning human beings, and they feel better. And in large part, it’s not because they don’t have challenges in their life. It’s not because they don’t have funky thoughts and feelings. It’s just that they are tuned in to the moment that they’re actually in.

And what that does is, it pairs your dopaminergic system to being present. And when we are present, we have more autonomy. Autonomy means I have more say in my life. Because if I’m off all worrying about the future, let’s say I’m worried about the job interview tomorrow, and I just get sucked down that rabbit hole, I’ve also ruined my evening.

That’s not right, whereas if I’m present, I go, Ooh, I’m, I notice I’m feeling anxious. Well, what is this about? Oh, this is about my job interview. Well, this is a thought about me falling on my face during that job interview, not the actual real thing. Well, what is going on right now? Oh, well, you know what’s going on right now?

I’m having dinner with my friends and we’re talking about the Packers. Well, now I can actually tune into the thing that I’m doing in a much more enjoyable way and get, not get sucked down a rabbit hole. Not because I turned my thoughts off or I fixed my anxiety, but because I paid attention in a way that allowed me to shift my focus to the thing that I’m doing right now.

So now my evening’s not ruined, and I didn’t ruin my job interview before I got there, which isn’t really a thing anyway. So it’s not a surprise that if this becomes a pattern in people’s lives, that would lead to a happier, healthier, higher functioning life. Versus, when I’m, I become aware of something that, I mean, I’ve been at dinner with my friends talking about the Packers, but really the whole time I’ve been worried about how I’m gonna eat it in my interview tomorrow.

So not only did I, was I not even aware of it to begin with, cause I wasn’t paying attention. Two, I just assume I’m gonna ruin this interview and I just, I guess it’s gonna happen, I guess I’m resigned to that. That doesn’t feel very good. And I missed out on this awesome conversation about the Packers with my friends and we were joking around so I missed out on Two moments in my life and decided the future one is not so good.

And so we can see how, when we start to develop a more mindful awareness, which again is not a state of Zen where I don’t have thoughts or I don’t have feelings or everything’s wonderful. It’s just me paying attention to my own experience as it’s happening right now allows me far more choice to be able to choose what I do with my time, my focus, my energy.

It pairs my dopaminergic system to being okay, not feeling okay all the time, which is great. And when we are present, it is a psychological state where our prefrontal cortex is online, which is another way of saying the part of my brain where I can make rational, thoughtful, creative, insightful decisions about what I want to do and how I want to do it and who I want to do it with.

is online rather than me just being in defense mode all the time. So it’s, long story short, this mindful awareness and the mindful practices behind it allow us to be in a state where we can be uncomfortable, be uncertain, perhaps have some funky thoughts, and maybe even have some challenging, difficult things happen to us, but still give us the most room to choose how we want to pursue the things that are important to us.

And I’m, I’m guessing be more accepting of certain situations as well, which we’ve touched on more in depth in past episodes if people want to go back and listen to that. Yeah, because the mindful awareness is accepting of things as they are. This is important because, look, it would be nice if we could just wish the world to be what we think it should be, but that’s not how it works.

Right? The world works on the laws of physics. And the bottom line is, if I wish life was easier or I wish they would just give me this job without having to interview or I wish this person or I think the world should, I shouldn’t feel anxiety anymore and all these things. They’re just wishes and they’re just shoulds.

But when we deal with things as they actually are, even when they’re less than ideal. One, we become more capable of dealing with those things because we are dealing with them as they are, rather than we think that they should be. That gives us more control, more autonomy, and allows us to be present more often.

You know, if we’re kind of using that interview example, like, Well, I shouldn’t feel anxious about this interview. Well, you are. And so if I tell myself I shouldn’t, which by the way, if I told you you’re feeling anxious about a job interview tomorrow, you shouldn’t be feeling anxious. Do you feel better or worse?

Worse. Worse. So I’ve now made myself feel worse. What if I said, oh, you are, you are feeling pretty anxious. Like I can see how you would feel that. What is that anxiety about? Now you’re dealing with the anxiety at the source, which is you’re projecting a future that you are seeing play out in an awful way, even though it hasn’t actually happened yet.

And then you can actually go, okay, well, hold on a second. Am I just projecting this? Or is there something perhaps I can do to prepare a little bit better, et cetera? Like there’s options there for us. Whereas if we’re a little bit more mindless in that situation and unaccepting of things as they are, we don’t really get those options because we’re trying to deal with something that doesn’t actually exist.

Raymond, how can people get started with mindfulness meditation? What are some, what are some ways you recommend to people need to be doing this for a full hour is a few minutes a day effective. What do you, yeah. the vast majority of research shows that the minimum dosage is about 6 minutes, maximum dosage is about 20 per day, per day.

So, whereas a cold, cold exposure would be 11 minutes per week, this is a little more that we want to be going after and a little more consistently to be effective, okay. A little bit more structured in terms of the amount of minutes and how frequently. So, what I would recommend to people is just start with like, even if, so six minutes is the minimum dosage, but you can work up to that.

And it can be difficult for people, like let’s say you have a mindful practice where you’re just sitting with your thoughts without trying to do anything with them. So I’m just going to observe my inner experience, meaning my thoughts and feelings, and do nothing with them. and just allow them to be, I don’t need to solve them, I don’t need to problem solve anything, I don’t need to figure anything out, I don’t need to turn my thoughts or feelings off.

I’m just going to sit with them for five minutes and, but you can only do two right now, do two. Work your way up to six. The other thing you can do is there’s a ton of different options now as mindfulness becomes more popular where you can get something like a guided meditation script or guided mindfulness practice on basically any topic.

YouTube, Spotify, iTunes, Netflix, I think there’s a ton and now those can be really helpful means to get into understanding like just kind of the flow of a mindfulness practice. At some point though, I would recommend to everybody, and again, this is not my personal opinion, but what the research shows is the, at a certain point you want meditations and start guiding your own.

Interesting. Right? So if I have somebody else guiding me and my focus to my breath, although that can be helpful for me to figure it out, I need to be able to do that in the situations that are most meaningful to me. I can’t be following somebody else’s voice. So if we’re using a golf analogy, think of it, those practices or like the analogy I use with a lot of people is like, they’re kind of like the floaties when you’re going swimming.

Floaties are great when you’re getting ready to go start swimming and you’re going to learn like, Oh, this is what the water’s like. But if you really want to figure out how to swim, like you got to take the, the floaties off, you know, and so the more you’re able to guide your own practice, even though it might be clunky at first, it’s actually a stronger means of developing a more mindful awareness.

So you can think about mindfulness practices as like an awareness workout for your brain and yourself. And when you start removing, you know, the floaties or the training wheels, we might say you become a better rider or a better swimmer. How do you guide yourself? Is it, do you recommend people just sit in silence and pay attention to their thoughts or focus on their breath and just note what’s happening or how, and kind of bring it back to the breath when they catch their brain wandering in a complete rabbit hole.

Like what, what is a self guided mindfulness practice look like? Yeah. Self guided mindfulness practice looks just like the ones that are guided, except you’re the one guiding it for yourself. And so if you look at mindfulness practice, they tend to fall under two categories. They’re single point and contemplative.

Contemplative is another way of saying I’m just paying attention to what I’m thinking, to what I’m feeling, or my direct, immediate experience, but just not doing anything with it. My friend, Pete, who is the Director of Mental Training, I’m not sure exactly what his job title is with a professional hockey team.

His analogy for it is, it’s like, you go into a cabin in the woods, you open all the doors and all the windows, whatever, so whatever could fly in or walk through does, and you just sit there. So if a bear walks in the front door, great. If it’s just a bunch of squirrels scurrying around, also great. And you’re just learning to sit with whatever thoughts and feelings you have without needing to do anything with them.

So essentially you’re just treating them as thoughts and feelings only, not as facts, not as things you have to problem solve or figure out, and certainly not as precursors to the future simply because they exist, right? So that would be a basic contemplative practice. a single point practice would be you are bringing your focus to a single point.

And the most common and the most historic for about 2600 years now is what we would call a breath centered mindfulness practice. Your breath in this case is the single point for your focus. And what that practice looks like is a bit of a three step process. Kind of flow. The first step is you are paying attention to where you physically experience your breath.

So you’re not just breathing for the sake of breathing, which is something we’re doing all the time. You’re actually paying attention to where you physically experience your breath. So when our brain and our mind moves away from the present moment or it flies, us trying to move thoughts with thoughts is often not super effective for us.

When our thoughts are kind of flying all over, it’s far more advantageous for us to come back to the body, which is why a physical tangible, like if I told you, how do you know you’re present right now? You can like, well, I’m touching this thing or I’m feeling this far more than some, you know, metaphysical or philosophical.

Well, I know I’m here in this moment because what other moment could I be in and et cetera, right? So what we would call a mindful breath or a connected breath is you’re actually paying attention to like the physical, sensation that tells you you’re breathing. You know, many people say it’s the feeling of air coming in their nose and out their mouth, the rise and fall of their abdomen or their chest.

You know swimmers often tell me they can hear their breath when they’re swimming or in the pool because, you know, they’ve got earplugs in and obviously the water amplifies that sound. And so it’s not just breathing and you’re not breathing for the trying to relax or to calm down. You’re paying attention to how you physically experience your breath.

That’s, that would be kind of the first part of the flow. Okay. The second part of the flow is inevitably in your practice. Let’s say you have a six minute breath centered practice. Your focus is going to shift away from your breath. Like our brain is designed to move, right? Which is perfectly fine. It might go to the worst case scenario of your job interview.

It might go to what’s for breakfast. It might go to my breath feels weird today. Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. We, these are natural shifts in focus for us. And when these happen, we simply recognize them. So again, this is our proactive awareness. So I’m connected to my breath. My focus is on how it physically feels.

And when it shifts, I go, Hmm, how about that? My focus has shifted to, and then fill in whatever blank. Then we use that. The third part of the flow is using that as an opportunity to bring our focus back. to the physical sensation of our breath. So it’s, if we’re using our breath as the anchoring point to the present moment, it’s essentially my breath is the present moment anchor.

So I’m present. I notice not if, but when my thoughts shift somewhere else, and I use those as an opportunity to come back to being present. And what this mindfulness practice trains us to do is one, Be present on purpose when we want to be by connecting to a physical tangible moment or sensation in the present To notice sooner and more efficiently when we shift away Because there are times for us to think about other stuff But there’s also times where it’s much more helpful for us to be present So this allows us to essentially train and practice noticing these shifts and then using those as an opportunity to come back to being present.

And what that allows us to do is go, I know how to be present. I can recognize when I’m not and I know how to be present again, in which case then you don’t need to go to a round of golf or a board meeting or an interview and go, okay, I got to be 100 percent present 100 percent of this time, which is a bit of an impossible task, but you can go, I’m going to be present at the times when I need to be present.

I’ll be able to sooner know when I’m not and then be able to come back. And then surprise, surprise, our brain starts to rewire in a way as we engage with these practices where it wants to be present more often and it helps pair our Dopaminergic system to being present because we’re giving it training on hey, just be present.

You don’t need to be here but also on your phone or you don’t need to be here and also thinking about this like just be here and research shows that at about 14 days of these practices, you start to really notice like your brain start to go, Ooh, okay, this is less clunky than it was before. And at about 30 to 45 days, your brain is starting to rewire and you start to crave being present.

The practice starts to become really enjoyable. And for people who make it part of their lifestyle most of the research shows that like, And you wouldn’t be surprised if you make something part of your lifestyle that it has a ripple effect of benefits. Most research shows that there’s people who practice mindfulness regularly are happier, healthier, higher functioning.

They have better relationships. They’re more open minded. They get sick less often. They are higher earners in terms of income, like all of these things. They have Lower rates of anxiety, lower rates of depression, higher life satisfaction, they tend to be better romantic partners, better friends, like there’s a, just an ongoing list of benefits to it so it’s a very long winded way of breaking down like a couple of simple practices.

But a simple Google or a simple Spotify search of mindfulness practices will bring up a ton. I would always recommend to somebody who’s just getting started on just find one that just kind of resonates with you or you like Even if it’s just a couple of minutes Start with something guided so that you can kind of get a feel for it And then once you kind of go like I think I could run myself through that start doing that.

Mm hmm It’s like any of the things we talked about on this episode if you You If you just start and you kind of evolve and stick to it over time, you’re gonna see ripple effects in all sorts of areas of your life. That’s right. And you’ve just got to kind of stick with it as it gets kind of difficult.

Although this thing with mindfulness is many people find it clunky at first but that’s not the majority of people. Most people go, oh man, that felt really great not to have to think about a thousand things. Or if I did, it was no big deal. Yeah, and I would say even when it does feel clunkier, your, your mind wanders a lot more than you would like it to.

You still feel better than you did when you start, when you have your eyes closed and kind of shut that off for ten minutes and you like it. Because it’s okay, it’s okay for it to wander. Right. Right, so the misconception that would be mindfulness practices are these like no thinking, no feeling. They are free thinking and free feeling, which if I told you Sometimes you get great ideas during it too.

I was told most contemplative practices that athletes tell me when they’re like, man, I had this great idea about this, or I found a real sense of clarity about this. It’s oftentimes because they were just letting their thoughts Trail somewhere without going. Oh shit. Don’t think about that or you got to be thinking about this instead And so it is or without checking instagram every three minutes Or without distracting yourself like, you know The long and the short of it is a lot of the things we’ve talked about are distractions Whether it’s scrolling through something trying to figure out what the job interview is going to do tomorrow That’s not even here yet and all of these things and being distracted is a low dopaminergic state for us Like, if you got back to, you know, we asked a question a couple episodes ago, like, why do we feel such anxiety too?

We are distracted a lot. And being distracted by the future that hasn’t happened yet, not planning for it, but worrying about it, doesn’t feel very good for us. And we do that a lot. And what our mindfulness practice is, is like, look, you got thoughts about the future, but like, how about being now? And then, Oh, you had another thought about the future?

How about being now? And the more you do that, you kind of go, Oh, well, how about being now? And then when we’re now we have choice, we have options. We have. More engagement and more meaningful and effective ways with the challenges and the adversity we face, but also the things that are more important to us.

Richie Burke: And we can more freely pursue the things that are important to us. And that feels way better than the alternative. Thank you for tuning into another episode of the Milwaukee Uncut podcast sponsored by central standards, still reproduced by Storymark Studios and Impact. Partnership with on Milwaukee, please share this episode with others that you think would benefit from all of the topics that Ray went over today, and please subscribe and review the podcast on Apple.

If you have not already, that helps us get more years on these episodes. And like I said, in the intro, if you do leave a review on Apple, drop your Instagram handle or your email at the end of that review, and we will reach out to you and send you something to show our appreciation. Thanks again.

Dr Raymond Prior: Everything About Anxiety

Dr Raymond Prior: Everything About Anxiety

Dr Raymond Prior is back to talk all things Anxiety and how you can get better.

Dr Raymond Prior is back to talk all things Anxiety and how you can get better. 

After listening to this episode you’ll 

  • Have a clear understanding of what anxiety is on a psychological, neurological and cultural level 
  • The difference between anxiety and nerves and how being nervous can actually help you perform at a higher level while anxiety cannot 
  • Why people have anxiety 
  • What are panic attacks and why do they happen
  • Why anxiety is worse than ever right now 
  • AND Recommendations for managing and reversing anxiety and what has personally helped me out 

Follow Milwaukee Uncut on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/milwaukeeuncut/

Milwaukee Uncut is produced by Story Mark Studios: https://storymarkstudios.com/

Sponsored by Central Standard Distillery: https://thecentralstandard.com/

In partnership with OnMilwaukee: https://onmilwaukee.com/


Transcript

Dr. Raymond Prior: That your nervous system just goes into full on power out, right? It’s super uncomfortable, it’s terrifying and that typically happens sometimes for very predictable reasons for people other times. It feels like just comes out of nowhere.

Richie Burke: Hey everyone It’s your host Richie Burke today. I’m back with Dr Raymond Pryor in this episode all about anxiety will touch on how you can manage anxiety and even strategies to reverse it After listening to this episode, you’ll have a clear understanding of what anxiety is on a psychological neurological and cultural level The difference between anxiety and nerves and how being nervous can actually help you perform at a higher level Well anxiety cannot You’ll learn why people have anxiety what are panic attacks and why do they happen?

Why anxiety is worse than ever right now and recommendations for managing and reversing anxiety And i’ll even go into what has personally helped me out This is an episode I’m excited to release as someone who’s dealt with a good amount of anxiety issues over the last seven plus years of my life. As some of you know, I suffered a really bad panic attack when it was stalled.

When an airplane was stalled on a tarmac seven years ago, I’ve dealt with a lot of anxiety issues since then that I never dealt with before, which is included. Getting on elevators, getting back on an airplane. I had to take a lot of medication to do so even being stuck in standstill traffic was triggering for me for a while.

And at times over these last seven years, when I was putting in a lot of work, I made a ton of progress. My anxiety went down. I’ve managed it very well. Other times when I wasn’t putting in the work, it spiked and Dr. Raymond, who. is a performance consultant who works with a lot of top athletes, Olympians, business exec, executives, musicians, Grammy winners, Emmy winners, is someone that I got introduced to about a year and a half ago and was lucky to be able to work with him for about six months.

And he made a huge impact on my life. And my hope is that if you’re struggling right now, that after listening to this episode, you’ll have a much better understanding of Why you’re dealing with anxiety and some real strategies that you can implement right away to get better. Just a reminder. This podcast is produced by Story Mark Studios, sponsored by Central Standard Distillery and in partnership with On Milwaukee.

All right, let’s dive into today’s episode with Dr. Raymond Pryor. What is anxiety?

Dr. Raymond Prior: Are you asking from a psychological, neurological, or, um, cultural standpoint?

Richie Burke: It’s not necessarily the counter response I was accepting. You could go down the line. Sure, sure. I’ll go down the

Dr. Raymond Prior: line. Okay. So, from a psychological perspective, anxiety is worry about the future.

So just a basic definition of anxiety. It’s us playing out the future in these what if or worst case scenarios before it’s even played out. Now it might sound really awful or negative, but if you think about when our brain evolved, which was many hundreds of thousands of years ago when the world was a pretty dangerous place, anxiety was a really helpful survival mechanism for us.

It kept us alive. You know, in that time, um, if you took significant risk, particularly physical risk and you were wrong once, you might end up dead. So what anxiety tried to get us to do was save us from the worst case scenario before it actually happened. Um, how it plays out in our brain is that you can think about our brain in kind of two different sections.

It’s a bit of a, uh, oversimplification, but it’s, you know, It’s helpful when we’re talking about something like anxiety. If you were to make a fist with one hand, this is what represents our old brain. So these are the strongest and the fastest, but also the most primitive parts of our brain. They evolved long before the more outer layers.

And this is our survival above all else areas of our brain, which is why they’re the strongest and the fastest, because you wouldn’t want the slowest and the weakest parts of your brain operating whether you stayed alive. Okay. Ironically though, these are not the parts of our brain that create anxiety.

If you were to take that fist, which is your old brain and then wrap your other hand over it, that represents our young brain. Our young brain is like our neocortex and our prefrontal cortex. It’s the parts of our brain that evolved later with the ability to think ahead, think back, think creatively, think rationally, to imagine, um, to play out multiple scenarios and do all these kinds of really cool things that we kind of associate the human brain with.

But one of the things it can do, is it can start worrying about things before they have even happened to a degree that our old brain goes, Oh man, there really must be danger involved. So the thing about our old brain is it really doesn’t know the difference between a perceived threat and a real threat.

Which is why, when we think about the future playing out in a really crappy way for us, even though it hasn’t actually happened yet, We feel it directly, and it feels very real to us, even though it is not. By definition, anything that’s in the future is not real, because it hasn’t even happened yet. So when our young brain plays out these future scenarios, what if this, what if that, uh oh, don’t let this happen, don’t let this happen, don’t let this happen, enough, Our old brain goes, uh oh, there’s a thing, now we’re on board, now it’s our time to take charge here.

And what it does is it actually turns off our young brain or turns it down. So when we are anxious, one of the downsides is that we become less rational, we become less creative, we become less able to see more options, we become more closed minded because the part of our brain that can do all of that stuff starts to become impaired.

So that’s kind of the psychological and the beginnings of the neurological roots about where anxiety comes from for us on a neurological level. Um, what it looks like is these very high frequency and really high intensity brain waves, which by definition aren’t bad for us, but what it’s a really an indicator of us.

We are thinking a lot. We’re thinking about the past. We’re trying to think about how we can make sure the past doesn’t repeat in the future. We’re playing out 15 million different, you know, future scenarios, all of them worst case scenario. And as this going on, so your brain is working really, really hard, which is in part why anxiety is so taxing for us cognitively.

Like, we get tired being anxious more than we would if we were being present. On a neurochemical level, one of the differences between nerves and anxiety, nerves is our nervous system, our sympathetic nervous system, activating for something that’s important to us. Nerves is adrenaline and dopamine, so norepinephrine and dopamine.

It’s a, it’s a sense of like, oh man, this really counts, but also like, Okay, cool. This really counts, right? Again, dopamine makes effort, struggle, and risk feel good to us. So for anyone who’s, for example, if you have people, um, who have gone to a job interview, or you were gonna go talk to that person that you think is cute, or you’re on the first tee, you know what it feels like to be nervous.

But in all these situations, a lot of people also know what it feels like to be anxious, which is, uh oh, what if this doesn’t go well? The neurochemical formula there is just adrenaline, which is why anxiety feels bad for us. So when people are like, oh, I’m an adrenaline junkie, I’m like, not technically.

You’re an adrenaline and dopamine junkie, because that feels good and you’re amplified. But, Just adrenaline for us as human beings does not feel good. Again, anxiety is a survival mechanism. If something didn’t feel good to us, we tend to get out of there. We escape. Right. And so where anxiety comes into play for us is anytime we’re going to be doing something with meaningful stakes, where there’s risk, there’s sacrifice, there’s vulnerability, there are outcomes that are important to us, but they are uncertain still, when we fill in that uncertainty with it, Oh, can’t go this way, can’t go this way, essentially saying we are unwilling to see how uncertainty unfolds.

That’s a psychological state that is creating a neurological state that starts to impair how well our brain works

Richie Burke: So in a way in those who listen to the goal setting episode, we talked about acceptance anxiety comes in a lot of the time when there’s adrenaline Uncertainty and a very low degree of acceptance for outcomes.

Whereas nerves, which are not counterproductive necessarily, they can actually help us perform better. A lot of people bundle nerves and anxiety together, but they’re different. Yeah. Those are not the same. Yes. Nerves can actually help and that’s adrenaline, but there’s also dopamine and FNF for, and so we’re like.

Yeah, we’re, we’re a little, we’re feeling a little nervous system is activated,

Dr. Raymond Prior: but again, so think about nerves, nerves, um, is our, a physiological response to when things matter to us most, that doesn’t necessarily mean we are in the threat response. Remember our nervous system activates yes to run away from the saber tooth tiger, but also to run toward water or food or a mate or whatever.

So nerves could be fight, flight, or freeze. If I need to right now, not in the future, but now, and let me go get the things I want now, not later now, anxiety is, Oh, what if this in the future? Right? Um, and so how that often plays out in our performances, if by definition, I am worried about the future and I am unaccepting of certain outcomes in that future, my focus is always going to be in part in the future.

Now I’m multitasking between what I’m doing right now. And what might play out in the future while the part of my brain that directs my focus is now impaired. And then you can see why there’s about a, a couple hundred studies that show that anxiety, is what disrupts performance much more than nerves.

Nerves tends to make us more activated, more athletic. If you’re doing something in a physical means, but also it narrows focus and makes us very sharp. Anxiety tends to do the exact opposite. You know, everyone here knows somebody or perhaps have experienced it themselves where you go, wow, that person is really smart.

They obviously know the material in class, but when it comes to taking tests, they take them through anxiety and anxiety. That doesn’t come out. Or that person is clearly a very good public speaker or knows the material that they need to share to clients or a very good golfer, but through anxiety they’re fumbling over their own words and they can’t even get off the first tee, right?

So the downside to anxiety is that as we start to glorify it sometimes, and we are definitely living in the age of anxiety for human beings, is that we tend to be glorifying something that is not very helpful for us trying to thrive. Now in a survival based setting, again, anxiety, very helpful for us.

And we as humans all experience anxiety as times, but when it starts to become a habit for us or a pattern of thought and response to when outcomes matter to us, it can start to disrupt what we’re doing in the present in a way that tends to lead us exactly to the things that we don’t want. And ultimately what it does is it makes the experiences we’re in feel much, much worse.

Richie Burke: And I know you, you work with a, with a lot of golfers, but If someone’s striping everything on the range and then they step on the first tee and spray one 50 yards right and they didn’t do anything near that before, that is usually anxiety and not, not nerves. It’s very

Dr. Raymond Prior: rare that people lose their physical skills in a matter of minutes.

Um, oftentimes if you’re hitting it great on the range or you’re, you’re crushing practice tests or you’re doing whatever, and then when you get to the thing when the actual outcome matters, that is oftentimes. A means of low acceptance. Low acceptance means I’m not willing for certain things to happen.

So what that might translate to directly on the first day is, Oh, you can’t hit this thing left, or you better not fail this test today. Which again, we think about it like, well, the way to move towards success is to avoid failure at all costs. But if you really reel back and take a look at it, we see actually that’s not how it works.

The more we try to avoid the things we don’t want, the fewer paths we have to be present with the things and move toward the things that we do want. And anxiety is an avoidance strategy. If we’re trying to survive, avoidance is super helpful. If we’re trying to thrive, it’s not because it keeps us from taking risk, being vulnerable, and making choices and taking free steps toward the things that we want.

And the Example between the driving range and the first tee on the golf course is one of the most apparent in sports for sure. Why do people have anxiety? We have anxiety because it’s a built in mechanism in our brain. Again, our brain is designed to keep us alive first and foremost, and anxiety is a safety mechanism for us.

Like, you would not want to live as a human being never having anxiety because eventually you would do something that would get you killed. Right. Having said that. Like walk in the middle of the street. You would walk through traffic, you would go swim with sharks at sunset. You would do something that would eventually get you killed.

Richie Burke: But usually we’re not in life and death situations. Usually we are not

Dr. Raymond Prior: in life and death. We live in an age right now where most people, not all people, I realize there are certain things going on around the world where people are experiencing anxiety that is probably more than warranted. For most of us, though, it’s the public speaking, it’s the social interaction, it’s I’m performing in front of other people, it’s there are meaningful outcomes.

The anxiety that is that built in response tends to disrupt us trying to do the things that we really want to thrive in. That’s where it starts to become disruptive. So that’s part of the reason why is that it’s a built in part of our life. neurological system. The other part why so many people feel anxiety is because if you’re not paying attention and you continue to respond to things with anxiety, either because it becomes a habit for you, or perhaps for some people, unfortunately you’re in an environment where you might have to, that becomes your default response.

It becomes my default response to the first tea. It becomes my default response in a board meeting. It becomes my default response when I’m talking to people that I care about and I’m in social settings to retreat, retreat, retreat. And the more you do that, again, it’s not that it’s bad or that it’s negative, but what it does is oftentimes it keeps us from really pursuing the things that we really want to do in the ways that we really want to pursue them.

Richie Burke: So it’s kind of a mix between Genetics and some people have that to a varying degree. Everyone has a little bit of that. We all have the capacity

Dr. Raymond Prior: for it.

Richie Burke: Um, in an environment can play, can play a big role. Um,

Dr. Raymond Prior: it is, uh, yeah, there are many, we call this biopsychosocial factors. The biological part is, it is a built in part of our brain to imagine worst case scenario to try to save us from it.

Right. It’s also a learned behavior and habit that I can reinforce over time. There are cultural underpinnings. There are, um, certain people who unfortunately grow up in environments where you’re just constantly under anxiety and you’re under stress and your stress response fueled by anxiety never gets to turn off.

Again, there are many people around the world right now where this is the situation they’re in. And if you do that long enough, long enough, long enough, your brain and your body learn, Oh, when meaningful outcomes or any risk or any, uh, sacrifice or vulnerability is at stake, we worry about it to try to make sure it doesn’t go a wrong way.

Again, not a bad thing, but when we’re trying to thrive and, and do the things that actually require that vulnerability and that risk in a way where we want to thrive toward them, it can become pretty disruptive for people. The other downside to that is it’s a bit of a mental health issue, too. Mm hmm. If everything in your life or most things in your life is through the lens of anxiety, that comes at a tremendous cost to us physically, to our health, to our mental health, to our nervous system, to our sleep, and there’s a ripple effect to anxiety Um, and then on a larger cultural scale, most of the things we engage with to try to alleviate anxiety are only fueling it

Richie Burke: further.

And I’ve been open on this podcast and a bunch of articles and things but didn’t in my case I think there was some genetics and then I think being locked in a car when I was young and thinking I was gonna die when the sun was beating down for an hour and all of a sudden in my late 20s, I have a Panic attack when an airplane stalled on a tarmac even though I’m in no danger of death I’m gonna get off the plane eventually, but that happened, but your

Dr. Raymond Prior: brain doesn’t know that right it knows confined space for like, you know our the thing about our psychology is it generalizes and It does this again because it’s trying to fill in gaps to try to make sure we’re okay So a car is different from a plane, but your brain goes close enough you know, uh, air conditioned plane is different than a hot car, but your brain goes close enough

Richie Burke: or an elevator or an elevator, right?

Dr. Raymond Prior: So if, you know, claustrophobia is a fear of enclosed spaces, it doesn’t say, well only this size and this, whatever. It’s just, when it feels like it’s enough, it’s enough. Right. And so because our, um, psychology and our neurological system and our neurology generalizes, you can see how it’s very easy for people to bring anxiety to things where it’s certainly not helpful in any way whatsoever.

But your brain goes, well, this is close enough. And unless we start to pay attention to these in a very mindful way, our brain will just keep doing this, keep doing this. And then essentially like, like that neck gets wider.

Richie Burke: Hey everyone. Thank you for tuning into this episode of Milwaukee Uncut sponsored by Central Standard Distillery.

As I said in the last episode, the team and I had a great time enjoying some central standard old fashions with their brandy at our holiday party. I also enjoyed some more of their spirits over the holidays. And if you are looking to cut back or are participating in dry January, they have some great mocktails.

On their menu and they got really good food over at the craft house just outside of the third ward So make sure to check out the central standard craft house Or any central standard spirits if you are out there shopping for booze Also, if you’re enjoying this episode make sure to share it with someone you think could benefit from the information on anxiety The very important information on anxiety and how to get better that dr.

Raymond is giving us on this episode Thanks again for tuning in. Let’s get back to the show Before we um, before we move into things that you can do to manage anxiety and help reverse it or help make it better Um, I want to talk about panic attacks quick. Why? When why and when do those happen? What what are they?

Dr. Raymond Prior: Yeah panic attack is is our nervous system and our brain in a full on threat response Okay, so it’s gotten so bad. It it’s think of um, You might think of anxiety rather than just on or off but in shades Right? And so if you think of it like a dimmer switch rather than an on off switch, and panic attack is dimmer switch, just like full brightness, like all the way on.

It is your brain and your nervous system going, I am under so much threat that the parts of your brain that can go, okay, hold on a second. What is the best way for me to navigate this? Are just off and you’re in just full on fight flight or freeze mode But keep in mind our default response as with most humans Are most organisms in the world when we are in full on threat response mode is not to fight It’s to flight or freeze and it’s starting to figure out what do I do?

And so your nervous system is so activated and again, it’s all adrenaline. No dopamine, which is why it feels Terrible and it is just trying to figure out how do I survive this but I don’t know if I can survive this I don’t and now you’re in freeze mode Right and freeze mode is also a survival mechanism that I if I just freeze and lock up Maybe the thing that’s attacking me will think I’m dead and just go away And that is what panic attack is.

It’s like your brain and your nervous system are so overwhelmed, whether real or perceived that your nervous system just goes into full on power out, right? It’s super uncomfortable. It’s terrifying. And, um, that typically happens sometimes for very predictable reasons for people. Other times it feels like just comes out of nowhere.

Like I’ve had several people tell me I was playing one of the best rounds of golf in my life. And all of a sudden I just started having panic attacks. Seems like it came out of nowhere, right? Other times they’re super predictable, like, I needed to go into this situation, where I, where last time I was in there, it was an absolute disaster, whether it was physically dangerous or something, and you could kind of feel it gradually coming, and then it hits a tipping point, and then goes through it.

So, um, panic attacks are, uh, unfortunately becoming really, really common for people. Um, in large part because we don’t do a very good job of managing our anxiety. I would just say culturally, particularly here in America. And then it’s not surprising that when you do that, you’re going to reach that, that point in the dimmer switch where it’s going to tip over to panic.

More than Than not or maybe not more than not but more often why is anxiety worse than ever right now Anxiety is worse than ever for us as human beings where I might say we’re living in the age of anxiety That’s not just my personal opinion like right rates of anxiety are not just the frequency but the intensity depression for people depression Like we’re living in an age and there are a couple of different factors So again part of it is that we have the built in capacities for these and again I don’t want to pretend that anxiety or feeling depressed are You bad things, like they are coping mechanisms for us as humans.

Even depression, like, there’s a significant, um, survival standpoint, benefits to feeling depressed if someone dies. So if someone, like again, think about back when we were living in tribes, and one of the tribe members dies, and we grieve that person and we honor them, we band together. Right? We have to hold each other up, and then also we go, Oh, well, if, if, if, uh, Someone dies and I feel bad about that, people will feel bad if I die, and then like again, it’s, it’s a glue mechanism for us.

And again, anxiety keeps us from hopefully doing something that gets us killed, right? So it’s not that these things are bad, but when they are running constantly in our lives, like, Feeling depressed about something or feeling a little bit of anxiety towards something, not a bad thing for us. But when they run very, frequently or for long periods of times in our life, it can be really, um, it can come at a tremendous cost to us.

Part of the reason we feel these now is because the things we do to feel good essentially to get dopamine are these, um, very quick and easy means that don’t require us to have to do anything difficult to get to them. So for example, or I’ll just kind of, uh, extrapolate a little bit. So it’s the same dopamine, but think about it through two different pathways.

There’s unearned and earned. Unearned dopamine is I get it directly from a single behavior. So that might be something like drinking alcohol or gambling, or, um, right now the rates of like people watching pornography are through the roof, or it might be something like scrolling through social media. So me just doing the behavior straight to the point gives me dopamine or eating food.

No work to get it. Right. And what that, by unearned, I don’t mean bad, but unearned means I didn’t have to put in any effort. any real effort, meaningful effort. I didn’t have to take any meaningful risk. I didn’t have to take any sacrifice. I didn’t have to be vulnerable. I didn’t have to work for it. And what that does is your brain is designed to get dopamine by the path of least resistance.

The downside to that, again, these are all extrinsic means of motivation, or extrinsic means of, um, dopamine, which means scrolling for a couple of minutes, now I need a couple more minutes, and a couple more minutes, and a couple more minutes in order to feel good. Or, you know, Alcohol, for example, alcohol is one of those things we know for sure people build a tolerance to.

So it’s a GABA inhibitor. The reason people drink alcohol when they’re nervous or they’re feeling anxious is because it works. It numbs the part of your brain that feels anxiety. It also numbs every other part of your brain, which is why you can’t drive when you’ve consumed it. But it works. It does

Richie Burke: feel good.

It’s a good topic.

Dr. Raymond Prior: But here’s the downside with these. So first of all, we build a tolerance to them. So you need more and more of them to feel the same relief from anxiety or depression. At the same time, the more I use extrinsic means to feel an intrinsic state, meaning the more I use an external thing like alcohol or scrolling or gambling to feel good internally or to feel not anxious or depressed, the lower my threshold for anxiety and depression becomes, which means the more things are going to trigger anxiety, the more things are going to make me depressed, the more intense and the more often I’m going to feel them.

You know, it’s kind of like, uh, drinking salt water, trying to feel thirst. Like, yes, initially, you’re going to go, Ah, well, at least I got some water in. But in the long run, it’s actually making you more dehydrated and making you sick. And so, again, I wouldn’t say that social media is a bad thing. I’m not a purist on these.

I wouldn’t tell anyone, don’t ever have a drink. But we have to pay attention to, Well, what are the means that I use in order to feel good? Are they more external or are they more internal? And the more I rely on external means to do that, the lower my threshold for anxiety and depression becomes. And then we also know that depending on what we engage with, not only is there a dopaminergic balance that becomes imbalanced, but the content of it becomes a problem too.

Let’s say, for example, it’s social media. We know for sure that for women, girls and women, usually between about the start of puberty all the way into mid thirties, the more you use social media, the more likely you are to be depressed and anxious. This goes for guys too, but especially for girls. And the reason is, is so not only am I using this external means of scrolling in order to alleviate my anxiety or my boredom or my depression, and my threshold for it is getting lower, but when I look at it and I go, well I’m watching the 3 percent airbrushed bullshit version of everybody else’s life that looks amazing, but my life’s not like that, and you do that repeatedly, you’re gonna feel pretty depressed, right?

On the other hand, when you’re posting things and you go, well, here’s the 3 percent bullshit airbrushed version of my life. And I know it’s a lie that I’m putting that out there, that things are that good when they’re not, there’s a lack of authenticity. And one of the things we know for sure in research is that the less authentic we are, the more depressed and anxious we become because we have to live up to the standard that doesn’t really exist.

So the engagement with a lot of our cultural. Um, kind of milestones right now, oftentimes create, um, a lower threshold for anxiety, uh, external dependence on dopamine, all the while also creating a situation where it’s continually telling us like your life is not good enough.

Richie Burke: I think of all the things you named off as well, you never, even though you might feel good in the moment, you never really feel better after.

You

Dr. Raymond Prior: know, not to dive too much into it, but it is really important for us as human beings to understand where we get our dopamine and how. If you think about dopamine, it comes on a scale, and that scale, or like a teeter totter, we might say, is between pleasure and pain. When we go, the reason something like working out or having to work for something and sacrifice and be vulnerable for something, the reason we get dopamine from that in a more long lasting way is because it tips the scale toward pain first.

And the way our nervous system work is it’s always designed to try to move toward equilibrium. So if I tip toward pain first, like a painful workout, a challenging thing, a difficult conversation, the reason I feel better afterward is because my nervous system goes, well, I’m going to reward you for your willingness to sit in discomfort and pain and uncertainty with some feel good.

Here you go. Yeah. Right. The, all the things that we just described, they tip the scale the other way first. They go pleasure first, which means our nervous system goes, Oh, that’s too much. We got to tip it right back. And so that’s why you feel worse after. So not only are you building a tolerance to it, but that tolerance is going.

The more, the more you need to feel good, the more I’m going to hit you to come back. And there’s your withdrawal, by the way.

Richie Burke: And you almost always get a natural high after putting yourself in pain. It just kind of hit me as you were talking through it, whether it’s a cold plunge, which sucks for two minutes and you walk out and you feel amazing.

Or in my case, if I’m anxious to go on a plane, I actually go on one and get off and did it successfully. Like, I feel good. You have a difficult conversation that you’re worrying about and you get it done. You feel, you know, That’s a natural spike in dopamine going off of that. Uh, you said this, I don’t know if it was 10 or 15 minutes ago now, but, um, that anxiety can really cripple someone’s life and it, it definitely has to mine and did for mine for a while.

I’ve worked hard at getting, making things better, but. After I had that first panic attack on a plane, I avoided riding elevator, going to events that would have been good for business. Cause I didn’t want to get in an elevator. I avoided trips with, with friends or with, with Brie over here. It’s thing, things like that.

Cause I was avoiding it, which is not the answer and can cripple your life. So I wanted to throw it over to you on if people listening, and I know there are a lot of people listening who are dealing with anxiety issues, what are some things that you would recommend for them to. To help battle through those and get to the other side or at least manage it and get better.

Dr. Raymond Prior: Yeah. So, a couple things. If we are living in the age of anxiety and it’s becoming a thing, we can get better at talking about that anxiety and talking about it with people who are trained to help us with it. So, I would encourage anybody who’s feeling anxiety, that in whatever means you have available to you, Like talking with a mental health professional or, you know, somebody who’s trained in a way where they actually understand the mechanisms behind Anxiety and the interventions that can help you.

So I would always recommend getting yourself in the hands of somebody who is trained to listen, learn, Understand in a non judgmental and in a way that is only in your best interests about that, right? Some of the other things that we can do is just on a fundamental behavioral level Engage with less with the things that fuel anxiety.

So Less alcohol I mean There’s no shortage of research that shows that people that drink more and drink more often experience more anxiety and more depression spending less time on social media. Again, I’m not railing against social media. It’s not a bad thing, but we do know that there are some really adverse effects for our mental health to do that.

And there’s a bunch of research that shows right now that basically if you can abstain from social media for about 30 days, all like just cut it off altogether, your brain starts to rewire your dopaminergic system, begins to repair and you just don’t need it anymore. Um, and so that’s, Staying away from, um, or, or I might say sleeping better.

So everything in our body, both physiologically, psychologically, neurologically, everything restores, replenishes, resets, rebuilds, recovers during sleep. And that includes our emotional state and our psychological states. So sleeping better would certainly be one of them. Exercise, we know it doesn’t have to be anything crazy, but just physical activity we know is pretty important.

One of the most potent, um, interventions for both anxiety and depression. And then what I would also suggest to people is finding means by which you can engage with struggle for short periods of uncomfortable times also starts to tip that scale towards pain first so that you get a more internally, intrinsically based, means of dopaminergic response.

So that could be things like cold plunges. Again, there’s exercise that’s included with that. Those types of things where you’re having to do something challenging without necessarily needing a return on an outcome. Um, start to, what they basically do is when you see that you’re good, if you were measuring people’s, blood levels and the dopamine in them, you would see, uh, spikes in norepinephrine, which is just another way of saying adrenaline, which is just energy and dopamine, which is another way of saying focus.

And it’s a long release. So those would be a couple of things that people can, can start to do, which again are difficult. And the reason they’re difficult is because you’re going to have to go through some discomfort for an amount of time. A little bit of withdrawal, so to speak, to be able to start to shift away from them.

Richie Burke: Yeah. Before, um, we move on to the next topic, I want to just share a couple of things that, that helped me and one, one I learned, one I learned from you as well. That first time when I had that panic attack on the, on the airplane and was scared to ride elevators and be stuck and stand still traffic. The thing that helped me the most was actually going and doing it, but not like going full blown in right away.

Like riding the elevator from floor one to floor on my building five times a day and then working my way up to one to twenty and then riding it without my phone. And I’d make those advances when, um, Um, when I didn’t really have anxiety doing it anymore, which is exposure therapy and that. Yeah.

Dr. Raymond Prior: It’s systematic exposure, which is like, go to the degree that you can handle right now, do that.

And then when you feel like you can do the next one, right? So let’s say for example, you’re really anxious about riding in an elevator and can you go to the elevator? Not in it, but to it. Then once I’m there and I feel like, okay, well, can I just get in it now? I don’t have to travel in it, but just get in it and maybe you get out.

And like I said, you can just kind of work your way up to it. And if need be, you would even start, perhaps there’s a bunch of research where, okay, let’s say for example, I’m just terrified of just even the idea of an elevator. It’s okay. Well, can I just sit with that idea? Not even near an elevator physically, whatever.

Just can I just have the elevator in my mind? Okay, good. Right. And so wherever you can start With that, uh, engaging with that thing that is anxiety provoking to you and then slowly and gradually working your way up to it rather than, you know, the, um, Full on, I’ll just jump in the deep end type of thing tends to be more effective for people because it won’t necessarily elicit a panic attack Absolutely, or you get there.

I did

Richie Burke: have a panic attack for the first I told you about this for the first time and like seven years since that when we were coming back and we were kind of Crammed in the back of a plane. It was delayed installed on tarmac And that was an example of and I didn’t take my medication which I could have done, but I wanted to do it without it Yeah, that was an example of me maybe going Going too far into the deep end where I’m on a smooth flight.

I was I was fine

Dr. Raymond Prior: and and again the circumstances matter Yeah, I would urge people, you know, one of the things that we know increases anxiety for people is trying to just not feel anxious I’ll just turn it off or I’ll deny that I’m feeling anxiety, which isn’t helpful for us. If you were getting ready to get on a plane and feeling some anxiety, I would want you to acknowledge that so that then you could choose how you wanted to do something.

And because you’re acknowledging it, you can go, okay, well, what’s my level of acceptance for this or what timeframe am I focused on? Or what future scenario have I decided is going to happen? And is that really likely, right? So when you acknowledge that you’re feeling anxiety or you’re feeling anxiety, You’re feeling depressed, it offers you the opportunity to then be a little bit more graceful with ourselves and others, and then also choose how we want to respond, which might not be doing that thing, but it might be.

Richie Burke: Yeah. In the, the one other thing I wanted to bring up, which you were essentially just talking about not trying to run from it, but acknowledging it, um, Um, in this exercise in your book as well, but the trigger behavior reward when it comes to anxiety or anger, if you’re having any of those issues and just starting by just tracking it.

So you’re aware of when it’s happening and what’s causing it. What’s the trigger, the behaviors, usually anxiety, the reward is trying to do something about it. Your body’s trying to do something. It’s trying to

Dr. Raymond Prior: do something to save you from what you don’t want to happen. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So what you’re talking about is how our brain learns habits and Make no mistake about it.

We as humans are creatures of habit. And if we pay attention to something like anxiety or depression that can be a bit of a habit for us, you know, particularly anxiety becomes a learned response to things. And the trigger basically means like, what is it that has elicited this anxiety? The behavior is, The anxiety itself, behaviors, can be psychological as well as, you know, physical.

Reward is a term that refers to the reason our brain would choose this response to this thing. So it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is rewarding or that it feels good. What it’s almost like, um, is the reason, right? So if we would say airplane is the trigger, Behavior is anxiety, worrying about, Uh oh, shit, what if this thing happens?

And the reward for that is your brain going, I’m doing something to save you from what you don’t want to happen before it happens. And if we’re not paying attention to that, our brain’s just going to keep running it on automatic. Right? If we want to change our habitual responses. Two things, we have to pay conscious attention to them, conscious attention to them, excuse me.

And when we do that, we can then now begin to pay attention to, well, what do I actually get from this response? Do I get what my brain thinks it’s getting, which is doing something to save me from the thing I don’t want to happen? Or is it actually making the situation worse for me and make me feel worse at the same time?

And then once we pay attention to that, our brain starts to evaluate whether that is or isn’t the best option for us. And if we show it that it’s not, it’s a process in psychology we call disenchantment, which is essentially, I keep showing my brain repeatedly, this anxiety does not feel good and it’s doing nothing good for me relative to what I want.

Then you can start to offer yourself a different option that allows you to engage with. The vulnerability, the discomfort, the sacrifice, the effort, and the risk perhaps required to Pursue the things in a way that move us more toward thriving than surviving So people can check that out in my book golf beneath the surface the primary researcher for that Which I know his research has been really helpful to a lot of people.

His name is Judson Brewer He’s at I believe Brown University both in their medical school and their psychology department He’s got a great book called unwinding anxiety, which goes through that entire process. I wrote the section on my book Um from a lot of his research. And I was actually just very disappointed that he published his book slightly before mine, because he did a better job of synthesizing his research than I did.

Richie Burke: But tracking it made a big difference. And then the trigger behavior, the reward, and then the, what it’s actually doing and physically writing that out, like what’s the anxiety actually doing kind of making me more anxious, not doing anything productive and then writing what’s a better response. A few deep breaths or whatever that might be or engulf, if it’s caused by that, you know, a free swing would be a better response than trying to steer it 50 yards away from the out of bounds.

Exactly.

Dr. Raymond Prior: Right. So again, that then, then what that does is essentially it gets us out of our immediate sensory experience, meaning I don’t feel good and I’m worried and into more cause and effect and cause and effect requires the part of our brain that’s going to you know, That can make logical, rational decisions to stay online, or at least give it a chance to come back online.

So if I can get out of how crappy anxiety feels right now, not by turning it off, but by paying attention to that, and then go, hold on a second, well, how does this making me feel? Do I want to feel this way? And then two, what is this actually doing for me? And you go, well, nothing good. That simple curiosity about your anxiety, rather than trying to turn it off, offers you the opportunity both psychologically and neurologically to go, well, maybe I’ll try this instead this time, right?

And that is one step closer to learning to do something different in all of those scenarios again, because it starts to generalize, our psychology starts to generalize.

Richie Burke: Hey everyone, thank you so much for tuning into this episode of Milwaukee Uncut, produced by Storymark Studios, sponsored by Central Standard Distillery and in partnership with On Milwaukee.

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