The process does get you to a deeper
point with the people you're with. I mean,
the people you went through in the process,
in a way, it's like going through boot
camp because you're going through something that's demanding
and meaningful at the same time. It's a
purposeful struggle
that's worthwhile.
Welcome, everybody. My name is Drew Horning, and
this podcast is called Love's Everyday Radius.
It's brought to you by the Hoffman Institute,
and it's stories and anecdotes
and people we interview
about their life post process and how it
lives in the world radiating love.
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Hoffman podcast. Mike
DePaidi is with me. Welcome, Mike. Hey. Glad
to be here, Joe. How you feeling?
I'm feeling pretty good today. Thank you very
much.
You are just a few hours from the
process, aren't you? Well, I'm actually yeah. I'm
a couple hours from the process,
vocationally,
but I did the process in 2005,
a long time ago.
However, it's been kept alive
over the years because
I've been lucky enough to do a annual
fishing trip
with eight guys that have all been on
the process.
Some of the eight have been we've been
together now for twenty years.
And you're on that trip, and Rasingrassio
is on that trip.
And so through that trip,
every
year, we practice a lot of the techniques
in the in the process as part of
the fishing trip, and it's kept me very
much, in contact
with the process.
And I have to say that over all
these years that it's, resonated at a deeper
and deeper level with me because of that.
It's a pretty unique thing. And you and
I talking recently
about
Raz and his passing,
it really made me wanna reach out and
connect with you around having a conversation on
this podcast, so I'm grateful. Thank you. Likewise.
Thank you. By the way, it's dubbed Q
fish. For those that are interested, it's Quadrinity
Fishing Trip. Q is for Quadrinity.
Right? Well, it actually came from the fact
that there's q twos.
So there's a q two, then there's gonna
be a cute fish.
Where it started is actually,
my father
put together a father son fishing trip for
thirty five years.
And, he had gotten his eighties, and he
had always organized the trip.
Same week in June,
same crappy cabin, same place, same fishing guys,
everything
over the years.
And over that time,
the week in Montana and Idaho that we
spent together
kinda worked time for me, whereas I'm up
in the stream. I thought about, you know,
my life and thought about, you know, girlfriends
and jobs and things that had happened in
my life. And then suddenly,
he said, I'm done. I said, you're done.
So what do you mean you're done? Because
I'm done. I don't I I have had
a wonderful time doing this, but I don't
feel comfortable standing up in the boat anymore.
That happened about two years before I went
to the process. And so
in my process,
couple of guys, we became very friendly in
the process, and I was explaining this and
a loss for me of this.
And they said, well, we wanna go. I
said, well, do you guys fly fish?
They said, no.
And,
we've now been doing it for twenty one
years together,
and,
we've continued this into another father son trip
as well.
And so now it's been fifty some odd
years I've been doing this,
And there's something about that tradition, but there's
also something about the Q fish trip.
It's a very unusual fishing trip where
we spend the first day or two,
everybody gets an hour
where they get to check-in with a group.
Just about them, they spend a whole hour
talking about what's happened in their life over
the last year. And some of these guys
that I honestly once a year, I see
them on a fishing trip. And so it's
been unique
experience for me
to experience somebody at such an intimate and
deep level
once a year over twenty one years.
And much like Hoffman,
people are working on various things.
After twenty one years, quite frankly, people are
still working on the same things.
But, you know, some people have resolved things.
Some people are still working on things, whether
it be in their marriage, their life, or
their job. You know, I always felt like
it was just it was such a special
thing to have that connection,
with men. Usually, it doesn't happen.
And on a fishing trip, nonetheless,
or actually, we do this check-in, then we
actually do something else interesting. We actually do
morning meditation in a group. I'm thinking, what
who goes on a fishing trip and does
a morning meditation?
But it's fantastic, and so it's meant a
lot to me. I've taken over from my
dad who's organizing the trip. And so I
feel particularly lucky
to have gotten on you guys, both you
guys, at really intimate level.
Yeah. And RAS has been on from nearly
the beginning. Right? I think RAS came on
in 2009
or so, and we started in 2005,
2006.
I made RAS through the process.
Turns out I ran a company called Kimpton
Hotels, and this guy, Bill Kimpton
and Raz were were friends. I think Bill
Kimpton was on the board of Hoffman.
Raz kinda took a particular interest in me,
and we got to know each other. And,
we had a lunch. He knew about this
fishing trip that I had, and he had
mentioned that he thought it was really cool
and might wanna come. We had a lunch
and, oh my god, he took us so
serious. I think he really wants to come.
And so he came, and I think it
had a lot of a lot of, depth
and texture to our fishing trip. You know,
he's just a really
wise, thoughtful,
experienced guy,
ten years older than I was. Also helpful
to see somebody kind of age and how
they handle that and how they handle it
with either grace or they don't have it
with grace. We had another guy in the
trip named David Bork who was ten years
older than Razz,
and he passed two years ago. He was
the the group truth teller.
When you were doing your check-in, he's the
guy that called you on your shit.
You still working on that? What are you
doing?
And, to have that is, it was really
a gift. So the so the Q fish
thing has been very
meaningful to me
and gets more meaningful every year. Really a
loss now that Razz has gone. Yeah.
What is it like for you to have
known Razz so intimately through these years on
this experience
and then to hear of his passing?
Well, you know, I had a little bit
of forewarning of it because, we had been
fishing together, and I saw I saw him
decline a little bit. I didn't think it
would happen so quickly,
but, obviously, it was very shocking. But I
felt sad but grateful that I had known
such a person that had been influential in
so many people's life to to have had
the honor and privilege to know him at
such an intimate level. And what's interesting about
Raz is that, much like all of us,
is advanced and has evolved as he was.
He's still working on some of the same
stuff
every year. Here we go again.
And that, I think, kinda gave permission to
everybody to be really human,
because, you know, if Raz is still working
on stuff,
how about the rest of us? It's okay.
I love that Raz showed up authentically,
which allow and gave permission to everyone else
to continue working on it.
What is it about
life that
has us not
resolving things necessarily,
but kind of still working on the same
stuff. Is that just the way it is?
You know, that's the nature of the beast,
so to speak? I think the bigger life
issues are things that you may be working
on for a long time. Again, nothing wrong
with it. The the core
issue in your life might be something that
takes your whole life to work out. It
might be graceful to know. It might be
exactly what you need to come to some
greater realization.
I don't think you can judge it. It's
just what it is.
You talked about the sharing and the meditation,
but why do you think fishing in particular
and fly fishing in particular
seems like a perfect
gathering
activity for this kind of thing? Well, you
know, I think men
need something to do. Take the day to
go golfing, take the day to go fly
fishing.
And fly fishing is perfect because it's outside,
and it's in nature, and it's very zenning.
I mean, when you're fly fishing, you might
be lucky if you catch one or two
fish a day. And by the way, just
for the record, I shouldn't say this. I
don't think rads are a car fish
or one or two because it really wasn't
about the fly fishing. But when you're on
that stream and you're out there and you're
spending hours
casting and looking at the water
and kind of taking in the scenery, you're
kinda getting out of your normal daily life,
and you're maybe with somebody else, you know,
with a guide. And what's interesting is these
guides. I had one guy, Smitty, been with
us for fifty years. And the guides were
the most interesting guy. I said they live
out, you know, out in the wilderness pretty
much. This is what they do.
It's not who we come in contact with
every day, and they're very interested in this
whole Q fish thing. Like, who the hell
are you guys?
We always get the guys
involved in some kind of conversation.
That was a very Hoffman esque conversation. I
think they really liked it. They weren't quite
sure what to do with it, but they
liked it. So it was kinda added to
the fun. Why is men gathering? You mentioned
men, and you talked about activities. But beyond
the activities,
what do you think is transpiring over the
course of those four or five days
between the men as they engage in this
experience?
I think that the Hoffman thing gives everybody
permission to be a little more vulnerable and
to connect at a deeper level.
And I think once you kinda step into
that and people are trusting,
it's a high trust level as well,
then I think people are more willing
to share things that might be vulnerable,
especially we get into the sharing and people
are talking about, hey.
You know, maybe something happened on my marriage
or something's not working on my job or
you know, people don't wanna admit that. But
oddly enough, it's the vulnerability that connects us.
It's not the perfect you know, that's like
Teflon.
But when people get vulnerable, then people suddenly
open up to them. And the only thing
I learned from Hoffman, I remember going
it's kinda funny. So I went to Hoffman
because this guy, Bill Kimpton, came CEO of
this company, Kimpton,
who had died couple years before I became
CEO.
He was really involved with Hoffman.
The legacy of the company was we really
wanted to excel in customer satisfaction. And the
way we thought to do that was to
connect deeply with our customers. And I thought,
well, how the hell are we gonna do
that? So we thought of ways to connect
with the customers. We thought the best way
to do that is if we got our
employees
to more deeply connect with themselves,
that ultimately, they would connect at a deeper
and more authentic level with their teammates,
people that work for them, and ultimately their
customers.
And so we spent a lot of time
and money training people on the Enneagram
as a way to kinda gain what we
call self insight. And for certain people, there
is an advanced course in self insight, which
was Hoffman. And we sent a number of
people to Hoffman, but they had to wanna
do it. By the way, the Enneagram training
was ten hours with a personal Enneagram coach
one on one. It's a major investment by
the company, and it was it was private.
We didn't ever get the results of it.
The service model for the company was care.
It wasn't service. How do we get our
employees to care? Well, we had to care
for them. And the way we cared for
them was helping them develop more fully as
a human being. And we do this through
the Enneagram. We do that through Hoffman. So
anyway, when I became CEO,
somebody said to me and said, well, you
ought to do the Hoffman process. I said,
well, yeah. Sure. I I'm into self development.
I'll do the Hoffman process. I didn't know
what it was. And so I get all
the paperwork, and I'm showing it all out.
And I'm thinking, this is, like, kinda serious.
I I I'm not really sure I should
do this. And so I call up Hoffman,
and I get somebody on the phone. I
say, hey. You know, I'm coming in a
couple weeks. I'm filling out paperwork, and I
I had kind of a leave it to
Beaver kinda childhood. I'm I'm not really sure
I should come. And the woman on the
other end says she goes, I see. Tell
me something. I said, well, she goes, do
you have parents?
I said, yes. She goes, you need to
come.
And, so I came, and I'm I remember
I'm sitting around that first day. There's a
big u shaped. Everybody's sitting around 41 people.
Everybody's kinda saying, you know, give me a
word
of of how you feel right now. I'm
just shut down,
hopeful,
excited, scared, where it might be. And I'm
thinking,
I don't know what I'm doing here. I
don't know. I I don't have anything to
come with these people.
But what I learned over a full week
of dealing with everybody
is after learning about everybody's struggles,
everybody's vulnerabilities,
everybody's humanness,
you love them all. I love them all.
I may not wanna be best friends with
all of them, but I love them all.
And so the big learning for me was,
one, I'm lovable.
But secondly,
if I just knew people at a deeper
level, I'd love them all. I mean, I
wanna hang out with them all the time,
but I'd love them all. It was a
big learning for me. And in loving them
and seeing and feeling that love for them,
what did that do?
I mean, it's easier to love yourself if
you think how easy it is to love
others other people. Because we you're loving them
for all their imperfections,
all their struggles, all the crap,
and that's why you love them. It's like
the the that bumper sticker, I love New
York. And say I like New York. You
might hate it, but you might love it,
and all the imperfections.
And I I think that's that for me
was a was a big learning of Hoffman.
And you did it when it was eight
days, and you were at White Sulphur Springs.
You really connected with a bunch of guys
there, which was the origin of the fishing
trip.
What was that like to find that kind
of connection with people on such a deeper
level? I think it was very affirming
that we all could share in the process
and then connected it at a deeper level.
And the process does get you to a
deeper point with the people you're with. I
mean, the people you went through in the
process, in a way, it's like going through
boot camp because you're going through something
that's demanding
and meaningful at the same time. It's a
purposeful struggle
that's worthwhile.
Did you bring
some of the insights? Like, how did
the process, which is such a personal thing,
how did that
return to work? And were you able to
integrate? And
I'm curious about the professional angle
of this deep inner work.
I think the best thing you can do
as a leader,
best thing you can do as a spouse,
as a father,
as a brother, cousin, uncle, is to be
the best version of yourself you can be.
And so I think what Hoffman allows you
to do is get more in touch with
that best version of yourself.
And, then that's really what we're trying to
do at Kimpton. We're trying to help people
become more fully who they really are. By
the way, in a corporate setting, when you're
in touch with who you really are, it
may not win the day because it may
not be the right thing. You may not
be bringing the right thing to the job,
but being someone you're not definitely won't win
the day. And so we were really helping
people become more of who they are. If
I was gonna give advice to young people,
I'd say, figure out who the hell you
are and be that.
You know, spend the first part of your
life figuring out who the hell you are,
and then fully fully step into it. And
why is that feel so important? I feel
the emphatic nature of what you're saying there.
I think we're all kind of given
a unique nature and kind of a unique
role in the world.
It's kinda like the old Joseph Campbell hero's
journey.
You hear the unique call. It's just to
you,
and you get it when you're young, hopefully,
and it's a unique call to you. If
you rise back home, then you start the
hero's journey. And part of that hero's journey,
let's just take it to Hoffman so that
you get the unique call to go to
Hoffman. But part of the hero's journey is
when you go into the into the forest,
because you're called to the forest because that's
where the treasure is.
You don't go where the well one path
is. You go where the scariest part of
the path is, but it's the part of
the path that you're called to. That's the
part you have to enter. And now you're
in Hoffman. Now you're sitting with 41 other
people. You're on the path. You've now entered
the forest.
And, in the forest, as you're guide as
you're learning things and you're growing and you're
basically coming against your own demons, these are
the demons. These are the things in the
forest that are taking down. There's all these
people on the line kinda helping you. Oh,
go that way. Go this way. They're supporting
you. And it's only by going through that
process, by the going through the hero's journey
that you come to the treasure. And the
treasure
is basically
being able to live the life that you're
meant to live.
By the way, now that you've got the
treasure, you can bring it back to the
community, which might be your spouse. It might
be your workplace. It might be wherever, but
you gotta go there to get the treasure.
I am really appreciating your connection to
all of the steps of Joseph Campbell's hero's
journey. Yeah. I love Joseph Campbell. And you
love reading, don't you, Mike? Yeah. I'm a
big reader. I there's just so much stuff
to read.
I find that I if I'm lucky, it's
that I have an insatiable curiosity
that I get up every morning and think
about, what what do I wanna learn today?
I may be two in my head, quite
frankly, I've been thinking about the quadrinity.
But there's just so much stuff
to learn about in both the kind of
the the the physical world,
whether it be, you know, history or politics,
whatever. But the inner world
philosophy
and it just never stops.
And the more you know, the more you
kinda wanna know.
And then one thing leads to another, and
I just keep stacking up the podcast. And
the podcasts are amazing. What an amazing new
medium where anybody
in the world you're interested in is anybody's
probably on a podcast.
And only that, you can have a visual.
You can watch them. You can model them.
You can think about what's going on for
them. You can have such a communication going
on. I mean, the last for the last
week, I've been in Davos,
the Davos economic forum. I might go to
Davos, but it's on YouTube. Everybody in the
world was at Davos. I can watch them
on YouTube. I might as well be at
Davos. What's that been like to be able
to transport yourself to Davos without actually going
there?
If you see somebody speak in public on
a, say, YouTube, their their video, and they're
being interviewed,
there's just so much trans weather.
And then it's really your present and just
kinda watch it. Like, what are they thinking
about? What's what's that body language? That guy
didn't agree with what they just asked him.
What's what's really happening there? What's really going
on? You said I'm lucky to have this.
Have you developed it, or you just have
always had it? I think I've always been
really curious
even as a kid. I'm I'm the one
that had all the hobbies,
you know, whether it was rockets or coins
or fish or
I remember that as a kid. I just
always kinda I always had a drive to
kinda know what was going on. I I
had a professor at business school
that used to get in front of the
class. It was a case method kind of
thing for an MBA, and he said,
can anybody tell me what's really going on?
And that was always, can anybody tell me
what's really going on? And I think I've
always been interested in kind of the what
is the grand unifying
theory of everything?
What is really going on?
And by the way, what appears to be
going on is probably not what's going on.
Yeah. So it just makes it interesting, especially
with people. People are endlessly fascinating.
Yeah. What podcasts are you loving lately?
Quite frankly, I'm interested in what's going on
with AI right now. So there's a podcast
called the All In Podcast, which is a
bunch of tech bros talk about tech. And
I'm a hotel guy.
So what what am I doing? I listen
to all this tech stuff, but I think
this AI thing is so important and really
trying to understand it and just listening to
these guys talk. And then there's so many
different rabbit holes to go down from there.
There was this other guy, Peter Diamandas, who
did the x prize. He's got something called
moonshots where he talks about the latest things
happening in, in tech for the week. So
there's kinda like business and technology,
and there's things like the Hoffman podcast, which
is great. Quite frankly, I love the, Oprah
podcast.
You know? And Razz got just got interviewed
there with Oprah. And I know a number
of people have been interviewed by Oprah, which
is kind of interesting. But there's just so
much stuff out there. Yeah.
And so if we get a little more
personal,
tell us a little bit about your story
and sorta
how
you came to be you
on a more personal level. I don't know.
It's so fascinating,
but I grew up in a small town
in the Midwest.
And, my father ran a small little business.
I think one thing that really influenced me
is the my father had a couple sales
guys work for him. And when I was
in sixth grade,
he brought home his motivational tapes that he
gave to all the sales guys. And I
remember I I was listening to them, and
there was a guy named Zig Ziglar.
And Zig Ziglar's
cassette tape was, I'll see you at the
top.
And I listened to that over and over
again, and it was all about having the
right attitude.
The territory of the world was basically neutral.
It was all I asked that interpreted that
territory.
And two different people could have the same
exact
territory interpreted completely different.
And so I think at a young age,
I decided to interpret it things more positively.
But I did come from a family that
it appeared to be super functional, and I
think it was functional except for the fact
that as a kid,
the one part of my quadrantity I was
really out of whack was was my emotional
side. And mainly because I came from a
family where my father was command and control.
Stop that crying. I'll give you something to
cry about. And my mother was from England,
and she was very, I'm fine. You're fine.
We're all fine. There's nothing to be sad
about here. And so I got very out
of touch with my feelings. Now lucky for
me, I married a woman
that was very in touch with their feelings
and helped me get more in touch with
my feelings. But I think the one thing
that came out of Hoffman for me was
I really I mean, when you had to
name the emotions you were feeling, I had
to look at the list.
And, and I probably still struggle with that
a little bit. It that's the one part
of me that was really clear to me
that he went through Hoffman that was out
of whack. Before she became your wife,
you guys broke up. I'd love the reunion
of that story.
Well, it's kind of an amazing story even
to me that, we dated in college, Michigan
State freshman year. I was a bartender. She
was a waitress,
and I fell in love with her. One
of the first women I ever fell in
love with, but we were 18,
and that never occurred to me even to
get married, but she kinda felt differently. And
a couple years later, she married another guy.
I was happy for her. I went to
a wedding.
I've been to all my wife's weddings,
one I participated in. But, anyway, time went
on. I, was in the hotel business to
travel over The United States. You know, I
had plenty of girlfriends, plenty of people I
couldn't marry, but I never asked anybody to
marry me. Seventeen years went by. She had
two children. She got divorced.
I hadn't seen her in, I don't know
how many years, fifteen, seventeen years, and she
remained friendly with my sister.
I was going to, visit my sister in
Michigan, Lake Michigan. She said that in summer
nineteen ninety one, she said, by the way,
Holly will be there. I said, well, great.
Holly, I haven't seen her in so long.
It'd be great to see her. We're gonna
take much more of it. I saw her
and boom.
It was just like that. Within a couple
of months, we were engaged,
and then we were married shortly thereafter.
Kind of a funny story about it, besides
that part of it, which is amazing
to me even now,
is that we got engaged in a high
level on over Napa Valley.
And I was living in a beach at
that time. Holly was living in Detroit, Michigan.
We met in, Napa Valley, and we flew
in a hot air balloon and got engaged.
Years later,
we built a house in Napa Valley,
and I live in it right now.
And then we realized when we built the
house, all the hot air balloons fly right
over our house.
So we actually
flew over this piece of land
when we were not even living in in
Northern California.
And all these years later, here we are.
It's just kind of, you know, one of
those freaky things that and it was a
big coincidence. What does it mean? I must
admit, I never had a stronger intuitive feeling
about anything other than.
It was a strong intuitive feeling. We've had
a son together, and I've got two steps
around.
Yeah.
Your evening ritual in that Napa Valley land
that you flew over is you and Holly
walking, listening to podcasts with your dogs.
It's unbelievable. We're lucky to live in a
area that's got a lot of vineyards around
us. We've got a five mile walk. We
can take maybe, like, 10 different five mile
walks to base the mountains on both sides.
And we walk on the survey night for
an hour, hour and a half, and we
listen to our books on tape. That's why
I'm getting so many books read, and then
we come back and have a glass of
wine and talk about the day. It's just
such a healthy thing to do. And I
now kid with with Holly, she's, you know,
she's 69 now. I call her my trophy
wife.
Yeah. She gets a kick out of that.
But, you know, hey. Listen. You walk an
hour and a half every night. You get
outside. You get in good shape.
Oh, I'm just grateful for this conversation. What's
it like to talk about
Holly, your life, your process,
all of it? Well, it's just fun to
talk to you. And the fact that you
have an interest in it, I feel very
blessed in my life. And if I look
back at things like the coincidence of going
to Hoffman,
the coincidence
of having a close relationship,
with RAS,
Just how those things actually were very impactful
to me, but they kinda happened coincidentally.
You don't know at the time, but you
look back and then you realize how those
chance encounters
actually are significant
and they resonate. So I I guess my
only maybe not advice, I don't know what
it is, but I feel lucky that over
time,
I feel like I've I've established a pretty
good intuitive sense about things.
And, and kind of what I should do
or what I shouldn't do or what I'm
drawn to or what I'm not drawn to,
and I kinda rely on that.
And part of that was maybe
pulling through, you know, probably, like, twenty five
years of meditation to probably things like Hoffman,
for sure.
When you talk about your intuition and aging,
one of the stories you bring up is
your mom's last moments.
Can you share that moment you had with
her?
Yeah. I'd be glad to share that. So,
I was very blessed that my my mother
just shy of her 90 birthday,
and I'd have to say that her health
span
and her lifespan
lined up almost perfectly.
She was really only kind of infirm for
a couple weeks
and really only a couple days.
Couple days before her death, she asked for
hospice.
She she had control of that. She asked
for last rites. And it was two days
before she died, and I'm at her deathbed.
And I happen to be in my father's
deathbed too, which I think really is a
blessing to be at your parents' deathbed, both
lived long lives. My mother grabbed my arm
and she's she looked him in the eye.
She'd been sleeping a lot. She opened her
eyes. She said, Michael,
Diane's not so bad.
I said, mom, aren't you scared?
She goes scared. Scared of what? I thought,
well, what a what a gift from a
dying parent now. That's a real blessing to
have a parent live so long. I I
don't even know
what to make of that, and then to
be able to say that or death, but
I think dying may not be so bad.
I don't know. Being dead may not be
so bad. Dying.
No thanks.
That's scary. I think it was a Woody
Allen said, I don't mind dying. I just
don't wanna be there when it happens.
Mike.
I look forward to our next Q fish.
Hey. Absolutely. Thanks for taking the time to
do this. This is a lot of fun.
I'm so grateful. You bring so much energy
and aliveness, and your real calling card, Mike,
is your incessant
curiosity.
I love it.
Oh, thanks for recognizing it, Drew. And, and
you are great at what you do, and
I I love seeing what you do. And
I love listening to your podcast. I can't
wait to see you at the Cube Fish.
Yeah. I'm gonna see you before that, hopefully.
That's it. I'm gonna come visit you in
Napa Valley, brother. Okay, brother. Take care. I
love you.
Thank you for listening to the Hoffman podcast.
My name is Matt Brannigan. I'm the CEO
of the Hoffman Institute Foundation and a Hoffman
teacher. Our mission is to provide greater access
to the wisdom and power of love within
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and in the world. To learn more or
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visit hoffman institute dot org.