Dominick  0:00  
I was talking with a student who's interested to do some work on men's health. She was talking about the loneliness epidemic, and she was like, "Yeah, I don't think it's just traditional masculinities that fall into it. I agree; it's not just a traditional masculinities thing. And I reminded her, you know, in my life, connection is really central, and I'd been really fortunate because I've been able to connect with people in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and people in Kathmandu, Nepal, and India, and like all these different places, and have like nice conversations and learn about their lives and hear about their kids, and I get messages all the time from people I haven't heard from for a couple of years, and they're like, "What are you doing? And it's great, but sometimes, you know, especially for men, even if you have somebody like me who's very open and empathetic, not all men are ready to receive it. So you can be as open and forthcoming as you want, but if the person on the other end isn't ready to receive it, we get much more of this kind of Polarization. Thank you so much, Dominic, for being here and for being willing to share your story, and just being honest and open with our audience about the truth and the nature of some of the things that you've gone through that have helped to define who you are and to define you know your identity across these thresholds that we will cover. But before kind of diving into sort of all of that, love to if you wouldn't mind maybe 10 seconds just giving us a brief introduction. Yeah, my name is Dominic Shattuck. I'm a researcher and kind of men's health advocate. I think I like to call myself that. It's a situation where I have a long career of working in global development and sexual and reproductive health. A lot of that work focused on women's health, but there were these little niches of funding and opportunity that kind of provided me opportunities to work on men's health topics, and so when that came up, I always jumped at the chance to do it, and that kind of put me into that space and made me a little bit different from my colleagues. Now I'm in my 50s. I transitioned through a big challenge related to the dojing of the American government and how funding is shifted, and I'm still working through that and kind of recovering from that hit. But now we're kind of in this phase and starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. But there's a long way to go still. Yeah, I hear you, and thank you for for being open to bringing some of you know your your background around research to the conversation, I think that'll definitely open up some interesting doors for for conversation. But to begin, I always like to kind of circle us back to sort of the early days of your story, and typically around that age of 17 or 18, when you're about to leave home, you know. And I think that's usually the first step where you know we try to kind of pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and and take a step out on our own. I mean, talk to me about the picture that you had of yourself at that time. I mean, who who did you believe that you were, and what did you believe mattered at that point in time? Yeah, well, what mattered at that point in time was very traditional kind of masculine norms, to be quite honest with you. I played football and basketball. I was a very athletic person. I continued to play basketball in college, and I picked up lacrosse in college too. So I mean, I was I played for the university, both sports. But I'd even back it up a little bit.

Dominick  3:37  
Had this big transition moment when I was a sophomore in high school, so I kind of hit this hit this moment where I had a very difficult sophomore year, and my family was in big transition. So I had a I grew up with a single mom, and she was she had been married and divorced a couple times once actually, and she was in her second marriage when I was a sophomore in high school. She eventually divorced that man, but our life was kind of tumultuous. We were very poor. We, you know, we were food stamps. We lived in the projects. We were, we were struggling.

Steven Evans  4:09  
Yeah.

Dominick  4:09  
When I was a sophomore, my mom and the stepdad and my sister and I were all living at my grandmother's house. Prior to that, I kind of bounced between my mother's house and my grandmother's house all the time, and so everybody was kind of in this one space with my grandmother. And it was a house where she had eight kids, so there was a lot of traffic. There was always people coming and going, saying hey, and this and that kind of thing. And I bring it up because it was like this point where I was getting lost in this space. Right, I didn't know what to do with myself. Really, nobody was looking at me. Like I didn't have anybody kind of paying attention to what I was doing. No one was checking my grades. No one was checking in with me. I was out on the streets a lot. You know, I was kind of like out with my buddies doing throwing rocks and doing stupid shit. You know. Yeah. And. You know, just kind of stupid adolescent stuff, and so I found myself in this situation where I flunked English as a sophomore in high school, and then I had to start taking night school, and I flunking English pushed me off the basketball team, and then I kind of was in this moment of transition at the church. I grew up Catholic, and I was I was doing like the confirmation classes and things like this, and all the same time, what I didn't understand was that there was all this tension in the wider family about my mother and father and the family living with my grandmother, and this was this was happening not to my knowledge to the point where my mom felt like we had to move out of the house, right? So it was it's tense. And one of my uncles sat me down and he was like, "Hey, man, you know, this is why people feel like this. This is why this is the challenge we're facing with your mom. You know, it gave me some details around finances and like some information. And he was very clear, like, you know, if you want to stay with your grandmother, you can stay with your grandma because my grandfather had died. She was alone. I think they wanted somebody in the house, and my mom's context was inconsistent work and like kind of some. She was kind of confrontational, and also like who wants to live in a house with literally people coming every night for dinner and almost every night for like coffee or whatever, which could be great for my grandmother. Loved it, but over time, people stopped coming to see my grandmother because they they didn't want to see my mother the same time. Super tense, right, Gary? And so, in all this tension, I felt the tension, but I didn't really know what was going on, and I'd failed English. I was taking these night classes after. They'd like go to go to second school in the evenings and stuff like this, and had this conversation with my uncle. I started to talk to the I had a very amazing pastor at the priest at the church, Father Hannigan, who kind of sat me down and we kind of talked about my situation and like you know very amazing guidance he gave me, and other than that year, I had pretty good grades, and I was a very good athlete. I was not a troublemaking kid. Yeah, I messed around, whatever. But like a normal kid, but like I wasn't like doing drugs. I wasn't like doing anything like crazy, and so I got an opportunity to get a scholarship to a private Catholic school, and I took it. And this was the transition, and so in this moment, my sophomore year in high school, I realized like, is it's on me. This isn't people aren't people aren't you know. It's I've got to figure this out, and it's on me. And I started to kind of build this this kind of approach to life, where you know what doors are open, and who's opening those doors? And am I ready to walk through those doors? If somebody can offer you an opportunity and you don't, you just aren't ready mentally or emotionally or for some different reason.

Dominick  7:51  
But that sophomore year of high school, I was ready, and I kind of saw like, okay, my life is either going to go this direction or it's gonna go this other direction where the more kind of idealized direction around like college and continuing to play sports and continuing to kind of like grow and have more opportunities. And so I literally told the the Father Hannigan, I was like, yeah, I'll take that scholarship. But and I got on my bike. I literally remember getting on my bicycle, riding from my house to the church, talking with hand again, getting the paperwork. I told them I went home and got my mother's signatures, but I really went around the corner and I signed all the papers myself.

Speaker 2  8:34  
Nice. And

Dominick  8:34  
I took them to the Catholic school, and I I brought the paper. I literally rode my bike over to Catholic school, walked in. I said, "Hey, these are my papers. I'm going to come to school here next year. Father Harrington will call you. Nice. And so that happened, and I went to this St. Bernard High School, which was it was life changing. You know, it was it was an opportunity for me that completely changed my trajectory in life. Not that I couldn't have gotten there, but the path became much clearer and almost like I needed the transition into new space. You know, like sometimes, like you, you kind of have to move away from something to kind of reset yourself and kind of get some more direction. And I got that direction through this opportunity sophomore year, high school. So junior year, I went to this Catholic school. I played football, basketball, blah blah blah, all that kind of stuff. Made friends and girlfriends and all that stuff. You know, like high school, normal high school stuff, right? But I also was now on a trajectory where I got this reset, and you know, I say it kind of in a as as like a step by step story, but I don't underestimate like just how many people had to make this happen? Like it wasn't just me signing those papers, but it was Hannigan. It was the the director of the school. It was the teachers at the school had to know where I was coming from and kind of meet me where I was. You know, it was people bought my fucking clothes. You know, like people had to buy me uniforms and stuff. I had like rides. I had friends who had cars, and that would pick me up and take me to school and things like this. I mean, it was a community of people that kind of came around, and it's really kind of pulled me in and and gave me this opportunity to to change my life. You know, I mean, and fortunately, I was ready to walk through that door and do it. You know, they opened the door for me and held it open long enough that I was able to walk through it. So yeah, that's when when I was in that moment, that's I find that it was the pivotal moment of my life, and because I I don't know where I would have been, but I wouldn't be a PhD researcher at Johns Hopkins University and the men's health fellow at the American Institute for Boys and men. I wouldn't have traveled the world, and my life would have been completely different. Wow! I mean, there's so much that I'd I'd love to unpack there. Thank you for for bringing this. I mean, when it comes to your family and your home, you know, that's often a place like a stronghold for for young men. You know, somewhere where not only do they feel safe, but they feel like they are accepted, and it sounds like that sort of sense of home was a bit construed for you. In that it was a place of tension, while there was support there, it was a place where you know you couldn't really spread your wings as much as you may have liked, given the the you know conflicts. It sounds like your uncle was a really sort of strong sort of guiding hand there. Where was there any advice or any sort of let's say ways of being that he introduced you or someone else introduced that helped in this time? Yeah, you know, I still think about this a lot, Steve. You know, I think about it all the time with my own kids and stuff like this. He was my uncle Larry was somebody who was central to my life, right? So like he was consistent, right? So this is about I think one of the things I took away from this was it's about consistency for me because my mom's life was so tumultuous. We were so hand to mouth in terms of finances and and you know just kind of I was every month there was a I don't know your background, but like every month it was a conversation of can we pay rent? You know, can we can we eat?

Dominick  12:08  
What are we not going to eat this week because we got to pay rent? Oh, we got to do this. We got to do that. I mean, I without exaggeration, I remember going to the store to buy milk and bread and stuff like this. With those used to be now they have an EBT card, but it used to be actual physical books of food stamps, and they looked like little pieces of money, like Monopoly money almost. Right, you would you'd rip them out and you'd give them to people, and they'd sign them and stuff like it was this whole process. I had free lunch at school. I mean, what people don't understand is that when you're when you live in those contexts, it's yes, it's a hand up in some ways or handout in some ways, but what you're not seeing is the tension in the house, right? So you don't see the month-to-month conversation about paying your bills. Now, granted, everybody's got to pay bills, and whether you make a million dollars or you make 50 bucks, you know, you got to pay your bills. But the thing is that in those houses that tension is so much more embedded in your everyday kind of who you are and what you're doing, and even now, I mean, I've drug it into my adulthood. You know, I I make a little bit of money, and it's like I hesitate to make purchases. I don't like, you know, like it's it's who I am now. You know, people don't understand like the the burden of poverty in terms of that emotional and kind of the impact it has on your on your decision making, your insecurity about who you are and what you what you can do, who you can be your friends. You know, like participation in things. I mean, I remember like because we never owned a car. Yeah, I mean, and I didn't live in like Boston. I didn't live in I lived in Central Massachusetts, where you needed a car pretty much to get around. And if you wanted to go to these baseball fields, a basketball courts, a you know football practices, you needed to be driven. And so, like I was bumming rides all the time. I mean, I was probably a good athlete because I I needed to get those rides to practice. Needed someone to come pick me up. But the poverty was a huge kind of component as to like defining how I see the world and how I kind of understanding that stressors aren't just you know oh golly gee I got a 82 on my test or a 65 on my test or I flunked out on my test or there are these these it can like provide a baseline to your life that poverty can can really impact you in terms of you know you limiting yourself as you kind of move forward, and it limiting you as you move forward more fairly. Right? Yeah, that was a big big component. You had another question though. I think I think I I went on a little bit of a tangent. Sorry. No, no. I was just curious also around your uncle and sort of the things that he instilled in you. You mentioned consistency. Perhaps Father Hannigan also was helpful as well. Yeah, he was great. And he, you know, what's interesting is he lived two blocks away from my grandmother, and he knew my grandmother's fam. They knew each other from when they were younger, so he knew the family. He knew everybody went to that. Pretty much, so he knew our context, you know, and he understood like this opportunity. But I, what I like to say too is like, as I've thought back on like the men and the consistency in my life and women in my life, when you grow up without a dad or you have a mom who's really challenged emotionally and like you know challenged with the being poor. My mother never graduated high school. She was she dropped out of high school in the ninth grade, and was pregnant as a teenager. So, like you know, her financial opportunities were somewhat limited.

Dominick  15:30  
But when you grow up in that context, you, or at least I, was very fortunate because I didn't have my own dad to kind of like as a point of reference, and this is why this is what I think really helps me a little bit. And the work that I do is that I was able to like say, okay, I've got Uncle Larry, and he's this kind of guy. He was six foot four, you know, big giant dude who there was stories about him beating the shit out of somebody, or like some story about him, you know, lifting these weights, he was like black belt and karate and taekwondo back when before MMA ever started. You know, like this, he was like a big, rough, tough dude. But he was always super gentle, and well, he would wrestle with us and stuff. But he was super gentle and stuff like that with us too, and and and thoughtful. So I had that kind of guy. Then I had another uncle who was a biologist who actually went to college, and they didn't live near us, but I'd hear the stories and would see him every now and again. And he was a marine biologist, and he lived down in Rhode Island for a long time, and then moved moved further away. I had another guy who was another uncle who was a machinist, and he had a company where they were fixing the paper mills and things like this. And then another uncle who was a mechanic and a body detailer, right? So you have these different people in your life who had those variety of roles and responsibilities, and had their own intelligences and their own kind of specializations and their own personalities. And there were many others, like coaches and and teachers and things like this too. And the way I've chosen to look at the context is, I went a little à la carte, and I picked a little this guy and a little that guy and a little of this guy, and kind of idealized those elements of those men in my life, and also many other women. I mean, what's interesting in my career is that now I work with a lot more men than I did even 18 months ago, but my entire career I've predominantly been in female-dominated spaces. So I was a school teacher for almost 10 years. I was then doing this research on sexual and reproductive health. Most most of my colleagues and bosses were women, and so it's interesting how it kind of plays out, right? In terms of like your, you know, the dynamics of work and life as you get older. But I do think I kind of picked and chose across those guys, and I found I found consistency mostly though at my grandmother's house, and like being in that house where, you know, she was older, she was in her 60s when I started to live there, and you know, it was really a situation where you know we became really close friends. Yeah, oh man, and and sounds like from her and the experience of your you know the various men in your life, you created somewhat of a network, right, of people to refer to and like, like you said, sort of select elements of their character that you wanted to kind of emulate and kind of include in sort of the things that you were pursuing, and that's so key, I think, to so many men. And that you know, there's a network of other men who are vulnerable and who are accessible and who are open to explaining. You know, here's sort of what I do with my time, my career, my life, and here's why. And especially when you're in the younger stages of your life, I feel like that's just so so powerful. Yeah, and and so I guess coming from from that place and then stepping into the new high school, where ultimately did that lead you? You mentioned college, and you mentioned sort of how it put you on this new path. What what followed? Yeah, so I still wasn't like I've never been a Type A type of person, right? So I still kind of like applying for college, especially with no one holding your hand. I still was on me to. I wrote all my college applications myself.

Dominick  19:18  
I didn't have a parent. I didn't have a person kind of looking over my shoulder. I remember I went to one of my friend's dad's, and so I actually turned to this guy, mr. LeBlanc, and I said, "You know, I have. I guess I have to fill out this FAFSA form. And he said, "Yeah, I can help you do that, but this is what I need you to get. I need you to get your mother's taxes. And you know the guy sat down with me, and he like he went through a tax. He went through, and he just it was really simple back then. I don't know. It's a little bit more complicated now. Not too bad, but you know it was it was very simple then, especially because my mother didn't make much money, so he went through those taxes and helped. Like just people kind of stepped. Here and there, but I had to kind of project manage all of that kind of stuff. You know what I mean? I had to the headmaster at the school would read my essays, and then I'd have somebody else who was checking up on deadlines with me, and then I would be doing a bunch of different things to kind of project manage those applications, which kind of should do as you're going to college. It's not not like a problem. It's just I wasn't really good. I wasn't very good at it. At the end of the day, I wound up transferring from my first school to my second school, and so I wound up graduating from school in Worcester, Mass, which I transferred into after my freshman year, called Clark University. And it was interesting because it was only 20 miles away from my hometown. But what's cool about Clark, what I think is cool about Clark, is that it has about 18 to 20% of the students are international students. And so, for the first time in my life, I had classmates who were from Japan, classmates who were from India, classmates who were from Ghana. You know, I mean, it was like classmates who were from Colombia. You know, there were there were these students that prior to that, you know, I was around just black and white kids and Puerto Rican kids up in Mass, up in Fitchburg, and then now I was exposed to all these different types of people from all these different perspectives, you know, just kind of like really bunch of New York City kids, bunch of New York City Jewish kids. As a matter of fact, like, and I didn't get a lot of exposure. There were Jewish kids in our neighborhood in Fitchburg, but not many, and I didn't have any real relationships with those kids. So now I had like this whole new world of people to kind of learn from and kind of understand and figure out where do I fit into all this kind of stuff, you know? Yeah. And so the education at Clark was far beyond the books for me. Yeah, far beyond the books. And I always identified as being athletic, and so I played basketball there, and when the basketball season was finished, I was like, "Man, I got to keep myself busy. And so I picked up a lacrosse stick, and I and I decided to join the lacrosse team because I was I was decent enough athlete, and coming off a basketball season, you're in great shape, anyways. And so I could catch and throw, and I and I ran. I could run, so they put me at midfield, and I would just run people over. And wasn't very good. It wasn't very good at all. But they put. I got on the field and and and helped. You know. So yeah, yeah. Oh man. And then that in those years, you know, when you're stepping into almost a new identity, right? You're leaving that boyhood identity behind. Stepping into the earlier stages of your adult, you know, manhood. What were some of the things that you were telling yourself about, like who you were becoming? You mentioned an athlete, but or was there anything that you were aiming toward at that time? No, that was always a challenge for me. Right, I'll be quite honest. Like that was always a challenge.

Dominick  22:59  
I was more focused on the here and now, getting through this class, getting through this day, getting this homework done, get writing that paper. I think this is actually a byproduct of poverty. So I think you're so focused on the immediate and solving the immediate problems of your life that the bigger picture, what's out there, and the stepping stones you need to kind of put in place to get to that point, it was always hard for me to put those things into place. Yeah, and I'll be very honest. Like until even until I was in my 30s, you know, I went from kind of job to job a little bit, you know, looking for like new opportunities and looking for new experiences, but I didn't have that larger vision, Steve. And that kind of came later on. And I, I wound up. I wouldn't say I fell into teaching because I feel like I'm a very natural teacher. I feel very comfortable. I've always enjoyed working with young people. I was a camp counselor in high school. You know, like I, I worked summer camps and sports camps and things like this, but I always like I didn't have that kind of larger perspective and like okay I'm gonna be a be a this or I'm gonna be a that or I'm gonna be a researcher whatever that all came later on now quite honestly, Steve, part of this is like it partially is the the poverty kind of vision dynamic, but it's also exposure, right? So, in my life, except for the the Native American, I just knew the jobs of the village people, right? So I knew cops, I knew I knew construction workers, I did know some guys who were bikers, but the thing is, like, I saw those people in in my orbit, right? And there were no investment bankers in my orbit, you know, like I didn't have uncles who were investment bank. I had that one guy who was the biologist, but I wasn't a biology guy, you know, so I couldn't really associate with that. So I didn't really kind of make connections with these are the potential jobs that are out there that could be something for me, which isn't a bad thing. It's just kind of the reality of being young and and and I will say dumb in that way. So it was dumb. I think I was in that way. I was really undereducated. So yeah, it's it's it's an interesting thing to think about when you are talking about like your vision or your goals as a young person, like a young adult, and I I will say like I really I just wanted to have a job. I wanted to make enough money to pay my rent or whatever I'm paying for, and so I wound up going back to school for one more year. And I got certified at the local state college. After I graduated from Clark, I got certified as a school teacher. I got a job teaching middle school right after that, cool. And so I taught middle school for two years, and then after the second year of teaching middle school, I was like, okay, I can teach. I know how to do this. This isn't the problem. The problem is I don't want to be here. You know, I want to see the world. You know, like, dude, when I graduated from Clark, there was this kid, Joe Poco and his dad was like the king of some tribe in Ghana, right? So he was literally coming off the stage. It was like coming to America, you know, like all the kente dresses and all this stuff was on the side. You know, I've been to Africa dozens of times now, but like as a kid coming off that stage, I was like, "This is fucking awesome! Like, look at look at this,

Speaker 3  26:23  
right?

Dominick  26:23  
And it's super impactful for me. And I just like I realized there was so much more to see, even though I went back to Fitchburg and lived in Fitchburg for a couple of years after that. It was super important for me to have seen that and been exposed to Joe and about in his in his situation. Had this other dude, I never forget. Like, sure, I knew who Nelson Mandela was, and sure, I kind of like understood apartheid. I, you know, I was in my classes, but did I really understand apartheid? Right. And so, the day Mandela was released from Robben Island, I was sitting in the basement with this dude from Jamaica. You know, we're just sitting there. In the moment, it didn't even like register with me. This kid was crying. This this guy, like he was, I think he was a little older than me too. I think he was like maybe a senior, and he he was like crying watching Mandela come out of the come out of Robben Island, and we're sitting in the basement of this dormitory in in Worcester, Massachusetts, and it's just the two of us. I feel like it was a Sunday morning or something like that, and I'm not a late sleeper. I'm out of bed usually, like 730 in the morning is the latest, right? So even in college, and so I'm sitting with him, and I'm seeing the impact this is having on him, and I was like, "There's so much I got to learn. I want to understand what this guy's going through. I want to understand why this Mandela's story is so important to this person, he's just not from South Africa, right? From Jamaica. I sat with him for like 45 minutes. We sat down there, and then I went off to the gym, and then I saw him at a party like a couple weeks later, and then I was like, "Hey, man, I was left a little drunk, and I was like, 'Hey, you know, tell me more. And he started to tell me, and then so like I then I signed up for the South Africa class, and then it was like the, you know what I mean. You get that exposure, and you can put a little fire under your ass around some things in a really good way. And so, yeah, but super impactful moment. And so, like when I finished teaching those two years in Fitchburg, after the first year of teaching, I had saved a bunch of money, and I drove across the United States, and I had two friends-one in Portland, Oregon, and one in in Sacramento-and these are high school buddies. They're actually two guys I just went on vacation with a week ago in Cape Cod. Awesome! So I like put it, I put it down like, "Hey, man, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go on this trip, and I'm going to come see you guys. You know, there was no cell phones back then. It was a whole different ball game in terms of traveling. You didn't have a phone to kind of guide your way on a on a map or anything. And so I drove across, and as I'm getting ready to drive across, and one of my friends' dads goes, "Hey, he was a school teacher, and he said, "Dominic, I'll pay for the gas if you let me come with you, and I was like, "All right, Norm, let's go. And so, me and my friend's dad, he said, "I just want us to make these stops. Bing, bing. He had a he had it in his head what he wanted to see, and so I haven't talked to him in a long time, the dad. But like, I hope that that trip was as impactful for him as it was for me because we kind of got to experience like different tourist spots along the way. We hiked down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, slept in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, hiked out the next day. It was a great trip across country, bunch of jokes, and you know, old guy with this young guy just driving. Yeah. And um, but I got out there, and when I came back for that second year of teaching, I was like, I gotta.

Dominick  29:40  
I had kind of ants in my pants, for lack of a better term. Like I had to move on, and so I joined the Peace Corps. Ah, okay. And so that's when I got to Ethiopia for a couple of years. And again, like it kind of filled an immediate need, like that need to travel and to see other places. But I didn't have a bigger picture about what the world was going to be. For me,

Speaker 3  30:00  
and

Dominick  30:01  
then when I came back from the Peace Corps, I had this moment of like had this grocery store moment. It's a pretty common Peace Corps scenario with different context, right? So my context was I was standing in the in the cereal aisle because for two years you would always do as a Peace Corps volunteers talk about the foods you couldn't eat, you know, like you couldn't get your hands on or whatever,

Speaker 3  30:22  
right?

Dominick  30:22  
And I remember really missing breakfast cereal and being in the aisle in Massachusetts. I got home after peace, standing looking at all the cereal boxes, and I was just like, "This is too much. And I had the, I had this moment of, "I got to get the fuck out of here, and so I wasn't ready to be back in the United States at that point in time, and so I found a job in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where I was teaching. At that job, I had a lot of male colleagues because,

Speaker 3  30:47  
yeah,

Dominick  30:48  
because the gender dyna is the cultural dynamics. But then after that, I came home and I had this kind of feeling like, okay, I'm I don't want to live in Massachusetts. I want to see other places. So I moved to North Carolina, took a teaching job, and at that point, I started thinking bigger picture. Like, I want to work internationally. How do I do that? And that became education and getting a PhD, and you know, figuring out how I could add value to some of those organizations that were doing development work. Interesting. Applying both the teaching background and then I wound up getting a degree in community psychology and did a lot of work. I was a statistical analyst for a long time, just crunching numbers and then started to get some projects and leading projects. And then as I led projects, I led more projects and more projects and more projects. So yeah, just kind of grew like that. So wow, and I mean the story that you're describing is just really incredible in terms of like being driven by a certain type of curiosity about the world, and also a level of humility around you know what it is that you know versus what you don't, right? I feel like being able to take that in and be you know not see it as a bad thing, but to see it as an opportunity, right, to sort of shake hands with a bigger world and explore what that might be. I feel like that is a driving factor in around this early start of your story. And was there anything else, maybe around you know the school teaching or the transition between Peace Corps and and then the next opportunity where you found that you were carrying something that you didn't expect. This could be a positive or a negative thing, but it could be something you were fighting against, or maybe a vice or a virtue, even that kind of emerged during this time that you had to contend with. Yeah, I I'm an incredibly empathetic person. I have a high empathy. Like if you put you were to survey me in some way, you'd have be off the charts empathy wise, I think, and so I do feel very deeply when I'm in situations where people are being mistreated or being you know in difficult contexts or you know I mean my students in Ethiopia, some of those kids would walk an hour and a half to school and home, you know, and it was crazy. Some of them would come and walk down on Monday from the other side of the mountain, and they'd come into the town and go to school for the week, living in somebody's like back shed, and then go back and farm all weekend at the parents' place on Friday afternoon, and then come back in the next Monday and just kept doing that, and so it was a really like I I feel like what I carried with it was like this kind of notion that like the service elements of being somebody like a teacher or being that that service both fulfilled a need for the person that you were providing the service to, but in a selfish way, it kind of provided me with a bigger, provided me with a lot of value,

Speaker 3  33:44  
right?

Dominick  33:44  
Right. So doing that work, and I think even the work I do now provides me with a bigger value. I think I need to. My work now is still evolving, but like, I don't know that I ever would have been a financial analyst, even though that has its own value, and you're helping a family to kind of be financially secure. I get that, but I gravitate toward the more immediate, you know, kind of the poverty stricken, the dynamic elements that exist. And I I realize that about myself. I think the biggest thing that I took away from living in Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia and things like this is kind of what's important to me. Yeah, sure. I want to have a good job and make decent money, and I've been really fortunate that that has happened at different points in my life. But I'm not going to invest my time in something I don't think is worthwhile. Yeah, you know, and it it creates a problem sometimes because sometimes you have a boss that wants you to do some bullshit. Yeah, other times it's like you know what's important to you. That's key, and relationships. Relationships are central to who I am. You know, whether it's those guys I had vacation with and I knew from kindergarten and first grade, or it's the dudes I just met here in Arlington over the last 10 years, and you know we have coffee every Friday. Wow, and it sounds like the sort of the identity that. Was formed as a result of this journey has been something that's held through even through to today. It's something that you know, even though it was started forming, you know, when you were 1516, the curiosity, the drive to help, and the drive to be a light in places of injustice. Right, those are really key motivators. It sounds like, and then when it comes to transitioning back into work from sort of that front line, you're really in the situation with the people you're helping. Was there a transition where, or anything that was uncomfortable, perhaps about transitioning back to the office kind of work, where you know you're not out there helping necessarily directly, but you're doing search right. It became kind of buffered. It was a little bit in the beginning, kind of having been a school teacher, you're kind of hands on with the kids, you're working with the kids, doing stuff all the time. But I had gone to graduate school, and I was full time graduate school for a while, for a few years, and then I did. I had a project where I was kind of going around to schools in North Carolina and observing how teachers use technology in classrooms. Right, I wasn't like interacting with the kids necessarily, but I was watching the teachers and kind of, you know, listening and things like that. So over several years of doing that, and then taking the job at FHI 360, where I was running statistical analyzes and things. I would see people go on trips, and they'd go on these three and two and three week trips to Africa or African countries or Southeast Asian countries, and I'd be really jealous. I would have a hard time, like you know, I need to be going on these trips, and then eventually that started to happen, and it became some of that kind of desire to be hands-on was buffered by how fast life was happening. At the same time, in North Carolina, that guy got married when I was in graduate school. I bought and sold and bought a house. You know, I had kids, so like some of those things, I was able to apply some of that hands-on in my own orbit, my own tiny orbit, right? And my kids and that kind of stuff. So that that helped with the hands-on elements of it. And then when I did start to travel, there was a lot of negotiation involved with my partner, my wife, and I, and how do you kind of manage? You know, just going away for two and a half weeks, three weeks. It's not very fair. Sometimes we had her mom would come, or sometimes she wouldn't, and she didn't work for several years. She was able to be, you know, by choice.

Dominick  37:37  
She was able to be home and taking care of the kids and stuff. But money was super tight. I mean, there's a lot of elements around that. So, like, this goes back to that immediacy and having to solve immediate problems. And so, I think I got a bit wrapped up in all of that, and I was on the trajectory of the PhD, and that became the short-term goal over and above taking care of the bills and all that other stuff. And so we really went down that road. But once I started to travel, I got my fix of interaction, and I'd implement study trainings, or I'd have to negotiate relationships with ministries of health, or hospitals, or different organizations that we were hoping to work with. You know, and so yeah, I really enjoy it. I still enjoy it. You know, when I get the chance to do that stuff. Yeah, and talk to me about when the responsibility of you know being in a relationship or being a father arrived. What did that do to the sort of sense of identity that you had been carefully constructing up to that point? As a dad, my daughters are now 21 and 18. It's interesting that like I had no fucking clue what I was doing. Yeah, we we all do we all do our best. Fucking clue, and like fortunately, I married somebody who I don't know if it wasn't consciously in my decision making, but I married somebody who's so capable and such a great mom and such a great partner to me and caring for me and I hope I'm super I hope she feels the same way about me yeah I took a lot of lessons from her and you know in terms of like what had to be done with the children and stuff like this but most importantly and even though we may kind of have had our moments of arguing about like the little implementation of things,

Speaker 3  39:26  
the

Dominick  39:27  
two of us have never been on different pages when it came to the big things.

Speaker 3  39:32  
Yeah.

Dominick  39:33  
So when it comes to the kids and the big stuff around like relationships and participation and finishing, you know, finishing. If you join the team, you're finishing that fucking season. That's the way it is, right? You know, if you're gonna be in the dance team, you're gonna you can quit at the end of the season, right? Exactly. We're gonna do it, barring something tragic, right? So, you know, that's just one example. But we're really, I think, when it comes to those big things that we've never like gone two different directions. And that stuff. Even in moments when we've had like doubts or questions, you know, I think we've been able to kind of negotiate a fruitful conversation about what it is, right? So we're able to kind of talk through, like, well, I'm thinking this, I'm thinking that. What am I missing here? You know, that kind of conversation. And the other thing now is, as the girls are getting older, and I'm about to be empty nester. How do I want to say this? So I know both of us are concerned about this, right? So I know my wife and I, and I'm I'm laughing because we're concerned, but we're not worried. Does that make sense? Like we see this as an opportunity for us, but also like we know there's going to be a big adjustment. I don't know that everybody feels like this, but I know that several of my friends have articulated that when their first child went away to college, it was almost like someone had died. Yeah, because I think when when someone does die, your mind, even though you may not have seen them very often, I mean, with a child, you see them all the time. Even if they're out running around, hanging out with their buddies and stuff, you still see them at night. You see them in the morning. You know they're there. There's kind of like a sense of distance that's much closer.

Speaker 3  41:11  
Yeah.

Dominick  41:12  
And then when they go away to college, and my daughter was only three and a half hours away, right? But the thing is that her absence was humongous.

Speaker 3  41:20  
Yeah.

Dominick  41:20  
Now, when the second daughter she missed her sister, but she also was happy to be the only child at the house while her sister was away at school. Yeah. Now, when she goes and they're both away, I think it's going to be much harder. I often hear at this stage turning your attention almost inward, right, where you have to kind of reevaluate who you are at this point, and not only yourself individually, but also yourself in relationship, right, with your partner. When you're thinking about what's underneath that you can hold on to in this time, is are there any themes that emerge that you're feeling like are good ones to stand on in this time of transition? Thinking about it more in behaviors, right? In like, so I've seen myself do a couple of things, and I think it's related to the anticipation of being empty nester, right? So my wife and I just went on vacation by ourselves, you know, with being with other people, but not with our children. And the girls had to work. It's summertime; they need to make money for school, like their spending money is their money, and like that's you know we're not sending them checks and shit. Like we don't have the finances to do that kind of stuff, right? And so, you know, whatever they spend at college is is them, and they pay a little bit toward college too. So the thing is that we went away on this vacation, which we flew up to Massachusetts, went to the Cape, saw some old buddies, and the the point in mentioning that is like, you know, being an empty naturally came up a lot, and it was one of those things where we realized like how it wasn't difficult. There was no like back and forth. We've done all of these things with two kids in the car of different ages, you know, we can do this together without issue. But one of the things I've kind of, I think I've been doing in preparation for this is I've been cooking more because it's the end of summer and we've been traveling. We just got home the other day. I had probably three nights a week guaranteed I would cook. I'd find something and I'd cook, or I'd pull a recipe that I'd pulled before, and like things like this are helpful because you know we would eat out quite a bit, and not just the finances, but also like it gives you less of a connection to one another, right? When you do this, and then you can bring in other things of your life. You know, my wife is very involved with both girls' social lives, and like she hears a lot. I think she's much more connected with them than I am in a certain way. And I know she's going to be very sad in a couple of weeks. I will be too, but she'll be a different level of sad. It's going to be a tricky transition, and maybe some meals will help. Maybe a couple movies, maybe going out to see something, or making time with friends and stuff like that. Creating some space to kind of be with other people, because we also have friends who are going through similar transitions. And it sounds like you know the community element is really important, especially in this time, to be able to not go through it alone, to really get the advice of other people who have gone through it, but also to ensure that you have a strong relationship and strong like center with your partner, right? To go through this together, I think that's really key. It is, and it all be negotiation, right? You can make the time, and then you got to figure out to learn how to have the conversations as well, right? I was just talking with someone yesterday. I was talking with a student who's interested to do some work on men's health. She was talking about the loneliness epidemic, and she was like, "Yeah, I don't think it's just traditional masculinities, and I agree. It's not just a.

Dominick  44:59  
Traditional masculinities thing, and I reminded her, you know, in my life connection is really central, and I'd been really fortunate because I'd been able to connect with people in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and people in Kathmandu, Nepal, and India, and like all these different places, and have nice conversations and learn about their lives and hear about their kids and I get messages all the time from people I haven't heard from for a couple of years and they're like, "What are you doing? And it's great, but sometimes you know, especially for men, even if you have somebody like me who's very open and empathetic, not all men are ready to receive it. So you can be as open and forthcoming as you want, but if the person on the other end isn't ready to receive it, two things happen. One is that person feels uncomfortable. Maybe they don't know what the right thing to say is. They could get upset. The guys get like angry, like "What the fuck are you talking to me about that for? Right. But that's his reaction because he doesn't have the skill set and he doesn't have the words. The guy who comes to you like that is probably the same guy who's not going to open up to you and tell you a whole lot about his challenges, even the processing of simple things like a car breaking down or a billy god or something like that.

Speaker 3  46:16  
Right.

Dominick  46:16  
But the other thing is, once I get that negative response, I might be more resistant to actually sharing with somebody else, and so if I pull back, then if we all are pulling back like that, there's really much less engagement. We get much more of this kind of polarization. I think you know technology doesn't help, but it can help in some ways, but in other ways it doesn't help. Yeah, I think it's it's interesting to think about in terms of this transition, and there will be a conversation or two where my response to my wife isn't what she anticipated, or her response to me isn't what I anticipated. You're gonna have miscommunications, but how much kind of goodwill and how much in the bank do you have to kind of go back and say like, oh hey, sorry, got upset. I thought you were gonna say this, or I wanted. I was really looking for this. Or have you ever heard somebody say like, "I'm gonna tell you this, and all I want you to do is just listen. I fucking love that. I want you to respond to this specific thing, or this is what I'm looking for from you in this conversation. I don't do it very often, but when people have done it for me, to me, I'm like, "All right, I'm in. I can play this game. Yeah, it helps. It helps you too, you know. Right. It helps you to sit back and and know exactly how to support that person, you know. And instead of jumping into solutioning and all that stuff, which is usually our first instincts when we hear something's going on or something's wrong. You know, you mentioned you know sort of the research and and the thinking behind you know the loneliness epidemic. I'd like to just touch on that for a second around what are some of the things that you are seeing or feel could help in terms of posture for men out there who are who are listening, yeah, I mean it's really hard. Like, so you're talking about a behavior change intervention, right? So you're talking about somebody changing their behavior from what they've been doing for the last 2040, 50. In my case, 55 years, right? But you're actually asking somebody to change a behavior that they've that's been reinforced by their successes, or reinforced by their value they place on things like independence, the values they place on things like problem solving, but we're really talking about establishing connection and being connected with other people in a meaningful way that's gonna is mutually fulfilling, right? Right now, there are some really interesting interventions that are happening around. Like, the Aspen Institute has this group that's called Weave. One of the things they do is they do these little micro loans. I don't even think it's a loan. I think it's just a grant. And you say, like, "Hey, man, I want to have a community dinner at my house. I'm going to invite 10 people from the neighborhood that I don't know. Would you support that with a couple 100 bucks a dinner? Right. So what they're doing is they're thinking about like, how do you create the third space? How do you create the opportunity for connection? Let's say you have some kind of disagreement-not even like a bad disagreement-but you have some kind of like a political difference or some kind of difference in your opinion. For me, if somebody liked the Jets, I would have a problem with them, right? So the thing is that they, what they're doing is they're they're kind of trying to build up some of that goodwill, right? So if if you and I don't know each other and you're like, ah, Jets, Jets, Jets, they're the best, whatever. They wait till this year, and I'm like, ah, well, he's a Jets fan. I'm gonna write him off as this or that, and as we do with Republicans and Democrats, there's no kind of goodwill to say, "Ah, Steve's a good dude. He just happens to be a Jets fan. But the thing is that they're kind of creating that third space that facilitates that ability to look beyond the polarization that comes with answering one or two questions, right? And so I was really fortunate to be on a.

Dominick  49:59  
Panel a while ago with this guy named Pete Davis, and he's a filmmaker. And he, when he was in graduate school at Harvard, he actually worked for a man named Robert Putnam, a researcher named Robert Putnam, who wrote a really famous book in the '90s called Bowling Alone. Is that was that what it was? Yeah, yeah, I think it was called Bowling Alone. But what Pete did was he took the concepts of Robert Putnam's research around the disintegration of like bowling leagues and the participation in those third spaces became less and less and less. What really those third spaces do when you come together in community, even if it's a smaller community that's got a specific focus, is you're creating bonds with other people that allow you to kind of oversee differences, right? And to kind of like not oversee, but kind of move beyond differences, right? So you can kind of get beyond somebody's Jets fandom or their support for one side or the other of the abortion issue because you know that person in a different way. You know them for more things than just their answer to that one question. So Pete actually has made a film. It's called "Join or Die, and it's a documentary around the work of Robert Putnam. And then it's also talking about like these are some new third spaces that have been developed in the U.S. and people are coming together and convening at these spaces for specifically that purpose to kind of like build social support networks to build ways in which to kind of be together. And you can you can get the movie if you put in an application. He'll give you like a license to show the movie in a space where you could share it with other people and kind of have them come together and talk about some of the concepts in the film, but you also have other things like there's a group called F3. This is a pretty interesting. I don't know if we talked about this before, Steve, but this was a kind of a grassroots exercise group, right? So these dudes down in Charlotte, North Carolina, they were like former military. Some of them special forces, some of them not, and some of them weren't in the military at all, and they just put together like this early morning workout. So for me, 530 in the morning is hard. Yeah, it's hard for me to get out of bed for that one, right? But for a lot of guys, that's when they have to work out because of their life and what they have going on. And so these guys started this workout group, and it got really big, like 7080, people, and they were like, you know, this park is only so big. We're taking up too much of the space. We need to split this group, and also some people live over here, and some people live over here. So we're going to split this group in half. And so over a couple months, guys move away, other guys joined, more guys joined, people move around, and so then they started to organize the exercises. The guy who moves away to like Louisville or something, he's like, "All right, I'm gonna start an f3 group here in Louisville, and he starts pulling guys together. And then another guy goes to like let's say Durham from Charlotte or something like that, and he starts an f3 group and he's doing a 530 workout there, and they're all connected because they share like you know exercises online or they share like information about the organization itself. It's all free. It's completely free, but it gives guys a chance to convene. And they've also been wise enough in this organization to be like, this isn't just about exercise. f3 stands for faith, fellowship, and fitness, but they were really clear. Like some people are going to show up with their Christian faith, some people might show up with their Muslim faith. But the thing is that they're going to show up. We're not talking about that faith.

Dominick  53:30  
We're talking about like the enactment of faith in terms of like community service, mentorship, and engagement with other people, especially young people in your life, and you know, kind of being responsible to your family and in your community, and so I've been at a couple of these workouts, and the guys are awesome. This supernatural give you a little nickname and stuff like this. It's a really great experience, and I feel like these things are happening right now in the United States, and we need to figure out how to bifurcate them so that they can become that workout. Might not work for everybody, but what's the workout that works for a different group of guys and women, men and women? That's a specifically male-focused group, but what is that? What are the other things that would work for men and women? Or there's running clubs right now is super huge in the United States again, and people are getting together for running clubs all the time. These kickboxing, what do you call it? The MMA and the kickboxing classes are huge, and people are coming into those spaces all the time now. And that's all exercise focused. But what is happening in the arts? What's happening in like music? What is happening in? I mean, could be and could be bird watching, you know. And and it's just how do we bring people together to kind of address some of these loneliness dynamics. Yes, some of the loneliness epidemic issues are related to traditional masculinities, but some of them are structural, and some of the issues are related to structure, and that means finance, it means space and distance, timing, it means actually having a place to convene, and so. You know, we need to be a little bit more creative about how these organizations are pulled together, who they're pulling together in terms of what opportunities they're providing people for connection, and then how do you kind of leverage a lot of that to you know kind of go forward from there? And I think it's a great it's a great example of like something that started from just a bunch of guys exercising. They have like over, I think it's something like 1500 locations in the United States. If you go to f3 Nation, you can type in, and there's even like a map. And if you want to see, I guarantee. Actually, I know New Jersey probably has about 50 of these places. Wow, yeah, amazing. And it's like something that's not self grown, but not like franchises. But you go and start your own, you know, and you get to bring in organic, right? It's organic growth, right? Man, and it sounds like you know community and having that space to just be with one another in a non-judgmental way is so important to creating an open and honest conversations, you know, and and that's part of the mission of the show is to sort of model that and to be able to show what it's like to just have an open conversation about these transitions in life. and And thank you for being willing to have that conversation with me. And as we approach the the close, I always wanted to ask, you know, looking back across the full arc of your life, what is one thing that turned out to matter the most to you? Matter the most-that's a hard question to you. You know, it's interesting because the first thing that came to mind was was where we started around like my uncles and my family and that kind of thing, and around like the consistency, so when I think about my own kids, and I think about my relationships, and I think about both my relationship with my children and my wife, as well as my relationship with my friends and my colleagues, the critical element for me is consistency. Because within consistency comes in security, right? And it doesn't mean you have to be checking in, spending like hours with people. But when you have inconsistent kind of moments, unpredictable moments with people, then you're kind of put on your heels a little bit, right? You're kind of like, oh, why is he reaching out now? What's why did this person call me? What is it that they need?

Dominick  57:19  
What's the story behind this, you know, when there's no transparency and you're you're kind of tapped into on occasion, that can create a little bit of insecurity in the relationships. So really, for me, one of the big things has been, and friends have come and gone, and my intensity of engagement with friends have come and gone due to like space, in distance, or you know, life changes, but it really is like the consistency is really the thing that is most important to me. And I was a very inconsistent person, like earlier in my life. I was really kind of figuring out who I was and who I wanted to spend my time with, and that consistency plays out in how you show up at work, it plays out in how you parent your kids. It shows up in the workouts you do and stuff like that. You know, I'm far from a perfectly consistent person, but it's what I kind of strive toward in my life. Awesome. Well, thank you, thank you for being here and for telling the truth about your experience. It really means a lot, and you know, hope that the audience also appreciates, and a lot of it resonates with them too. Thank you. This has been the missing conversation. I'm Steve Evans. Thanks for listening. If something in there found you, if a moment hit somewhere you weren't expecting, just let it be there for a while. You don't have to sort it out right now. That's what this is for. Take care of yourself out there, and if you know a guy who needs to hear this one, you probably already know who he is. Send it to him.