OverPressure Podcast Baruch “B” HaLevi & Austin

From OverPressure Podcast · 40:04

Show by Austin Holmes

The Overpressure Podcast’s latest episode features Dr. Baruch, known as B, a Boulder-based logotherapist who spent almost 20 years as a rabbi, officiated 500 funerals, and now helps men discover and live their why. His father, a successful business owner, died by suicide 20 years ago, and his grandmother 20 years before that. B says he came close in his own desperate times and wondered if he’d be generation number three. What pulled him back was Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and its central idea, now his own: those who have a why can bear almost any how.The best material isn’t the résumé, though it runs from Buddhism and Hinduism back to Judaism, a doctorate in counseling and nine startups, most of which failed. It’s the mission he built from his family’s story. Israeli and American, he calls not serving in the military his biggest regret, and he serves veterans now through the 13 Minutes Mission, named for the statistic that a man dies by suicide in America every 13 minutes. Pushing that to 14 minutes, he says, would bring 2,888 men home this year alone. Alongside it, his nonprofit Men’s Peer Groups borrows the Forum model from Entrepreneurs’ Organization and pairs it with Frankl’s work. He describes it as upstream inspiration rather than downstream prevention: helping good men become great men before they ever near the waterfall. The groups now partner with veterans organizations, with the construction industry and with college campuses.Quick gems from the episode:→ Two common threads. When men fall into despair, through suicide, addiction or depression, B sees the same two losses: purpose and connection. The antidote is finding both again.→ “What do you do?” isn’t a question about your paycheck. In his book, The Guy in the Glass, a bartender asks a man six questions that sound like pickup lines but go much deeper. When net worth becomes self-worth, B says, a man’s identity shrinks to fit a box.→ “Come here often?” really means “Why are you here?” He asks wildly successful founders for their personal why and mostly hears Hallmark answers. His own mission statement, recited daily for almost 20 years, is what he’d say if his plane were going down.→ Courage comes from the Latin for heart. It isn’t charging ahead, it’s telling people you’re lonely, struggling or lost, especially after you’ve been hurt.→ “If you can’t name it, you can’t tame it.” Death is one of the last taboos, and facing it is really about how you live. Everyone has a stopwatch running behind them, and that’s a gift.→ Frankl beats Maslow. Self-actualization isn’t the peak, self-transcendence is. For a man who’s lost and lonely, the first step is to go help somebody else.The thread connecting two generations lost to suicide, two decades of funerals and a peer group model borrowed from entrepreneurs is what makes this conversation land, not as a story about loss, but as an argument that purpose and brotherhood are what keep men going, and that they’re worth building long before anyone is in crisis. Check out the Overpressure Podcast for the full conversation.

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