#167 Wandering in the Wilderness — Dom Francks on confronting fragility, his love of nature, the disconnect from nature, working as a software engineer, viewing yourself as a piece of poetry, how we're always embedded in nature and being guided by intuition

[00:59] Paul: Welcome to The Pathless Path. I'm Paul Millerd, and in this podcast, we examine the invisible scripts that run our lives and dare to imagine new stories for work and life. Today I'm talking with Dom Francks. He comes from Washington, a city, Olympia, right outside of Seattle. He got in touch with nature pretty young. Not surprising.

It's such a beautiful area up there. Took a path through the golf program at Stanford, got into the tech industry along the way, never really lost his love for nature, the world, the environment, and recently has taken a shift to move more in that direction, especially with his recent program Vivify, where he's trying to combine coaching, with actual immersive experiences in nature. I got to spend some time with Dom a few weeks ago, and I was really inspired mostly by his energy. Like, he just really comes alive with caring about these things, and it just made me want to talk to him more about these things. So welcome to the podcast, Dom.

[02:07] Dom Francks: Awesome, Paul. Yeah, it's great to be here, uh, and it was a pleasure to get to meet you in Boulder a couple weeks ago. Happy to be having this conversation.

[02:14] Paul: Yeah. Excited to dive into this. So I'd love to just start with the question I ask most people, which is what are the stories and scripts you grew up with that sort of shaped your reality?

[02:26] Dom Francks: Yeah. So I grew up in Olympia, Washington. Both my parents had law degrees, but for most of my childhood were not using them. And, well, I can get more into that at some point. I would say the, the piece of the script that I think is most relevant to how my path has unfolded is that my parents, when they were 35 and 30, left their jobs in the early '90s and went and traveled the world for a year and a half, maybe 2 years. And at the time, they described that as being like totally out of line with what anyone else around them was doing.

More so, I would say, than it is now because you couldn't work remotely. Like, you would be completely out of contact with any sense of being able to earn money, really. And travel was a lot more difficult. But they consistently look back on that despite the fact that it, you know, defined their careers. And, and they said that was the best decision they ever made. And so growing up, for me, there was always this sense of like, yes, do well in school.

Yes, open as many doors for yourself as you possibly can and explore life like it is. It is part of— I would say actually part of the default path that I learned to take that time to explore. And so when I eventually graduated from college, I always had in the back of my mind that I was going to at some point take a long time off and travel around. And I think growing up with that, like, honestly, mythology in my family was really foundational for me. In feeling super safe going and exploring and leading the wandering path that I've led so far.

[04:07] Paul: That's, that's inspiring, mostly because I have a daughter now. And so it's like, all right, there are this— there can be positive stories of this. I don't want her to think we're wild parents, but you never know. Yeah, maybe, maybe tell me more around that. What drove them to do that?

[04:26] Dom Francks: So the way that they tell it is they both went to UCLA Law School. That's where they met. And then they were working in corporate law in Seattle. And my dad, I think in particular, just really hated it. Like he just could not get himself motivated to do that work. Um, just very high workload, uh, not working for particularly inspiring clients.

And so they decided to take off and go see the world. Um, and the way that they describe it is that pretty much every conversation they had for the 6 months leading up to that, was essentially like, are you crazy? Like you're on the partner track. Like you're, you're on the track of all the things that you're supposed to do. And this is also like, you know, my dad's background, like he worked in a warehouse in LA for 3 years and then put himself through undergrad waiting tables. And so he was not coming from a place of, you know, a ton of privilege and he'd already had some wandering bits in his background.

Um, and so there was already this sense of like, well, I got off the path once and I got back on, so I can go explore and go do the things that make life worth living to some degree. But then, you know, they came back and like, what, 11 months later I was born and we bought a house and, and like I had a very stable childhood. We traveled some, we went and explored in the natural world a lot, but it really did feel like they you know, my friend likes to say, like, got their wiggles out. And but the amount that that trip shaped the way that my parents talked about their life before they had kids was really strong.

Like, there are these stories of, like, them being on the back of a truck in Zambia and the people are trying to, like, fix a flat tire with a butter knife and just all these crazy things that it was— it helped to both expand my perception of what the world was and also expand my perception of who my parents were and who these people were that were raising me.

[06:18] Paul: That's so cool. It— I'm laughing earlier because it's the exact same things people were saying to me. They were like, look, you're like right at the start of like really making it in consulting. You could be a partner in 5 years. It was like, and I wonder if it's almost easier to leave. Um, like I didn't grow up with a fancy background, but neither of my parents went to college.

So I almost think it might be easier to leave. Without having the taste of that as a normal thing? Because it's like you get there and you're like, well, what is everyone doing?

[06:55] Dom Francks: Yeah, I mean, I certainly think my experience was, was like that. Like, I never got like the golden handcuffs never like locked themselves around my wrists particularly tightly. And I sort of went— I was working as a software engineer at a solar company right out of undergrad, and I went in with the sort of plan A was like work for a year or two Save it up, save up enough money to go travel and then go do that. And so I don't think I ever tasted that sense of being at the, like, right at the bottom of, like, the steep end of the curve in terms of, like, recognition or compensation, whatever it is. And I think maybe that made it easier to leave, but I think it's different for everyone.

[07:40] Paul: Talk to me about your grandfather Paul. I know I watched a video where you're talking about him and his experience in World War II, but I'd love to hear what kind of influence that had on you as well.

[07:53] Dom Francks: Yeah. So I'll say like my, my grandpa Paul, he, he flew in the ball turret of B-17 bombers in World War II, which there's a show out right now, which is why this is top of mind for me called The Masters of the Air. Which is like the next series in a series of World War II miniseries after The Band of Brothers in the Pacific. And I think maybe just alongside or maybe just second to submarine crews, being in those bomber crews was the deadliest place to be in World War II on the American side, my understanding. And my grandpa flew 30 missions over Germany. And so my experience of my grandpa, I saw him every year or two.

He lived in New York for 53 years. He lived in the same brownstone, worked as a Maytag refrigerator repairman, and raised 5 kids. And so I got to interact with him some, but I think the last time I saw him was probably when I was 12 or 13. So I think right now, like in the last month or two, more so than reflecting on my personal relationship with my grandfather, it's sort of been reflecting on the intensity of life experience. That he went through, particularly in the war, and how that level of hardship and also level of sacrifice and collective sacrifice is something that feels pretty foreign to the world that I inhabit.

I was actually just talking with a dear friend of mine like 2 hours before recording this podcast and just sort of being incredulous that so many people and so many particularly young men in that era were so willing to go give their lives for something they really believed in. And, and I've been asking myself the question, like, what would I give my life for? I don't know that I have an answer quite yet. I could take a crack at it, but the experience of watching like a very well-produced visual of the experience that someone that I then met and connected with and has part of my lineage has really been rocking me recently, actually.

[10:04] Paul: Yeah. I mean, have you, have you ever stumbled upon this book, Sebastian Junger, Tribe? I—

[10:11] Dom Francks: yes, I have. Yeah, I've read it.

[10:13] Paul: It makes me think of that book where he, he just talks about how hard it is for men to come back from war because they have this such deep camaraderie of like, fighting for a mission. I've been playing with this idea that we're experiencing a massive inspiration deficit, and people struggle to articulate this because we sort of have like surface-level purpose, and it's like companies promise surface-level purpose and do all this culture PR and do the most meaningful work of your life, right? I went through like 100 career pages and took all the taglines and they all pretty much say something like this, but they can't deliver on this, right? The stakes are not high enough and it's just, it's not happening for people, but people don't really know where to look. And so it's sort of just this base reality where people don't even know they're stuck in this without inspiration.

And then you see stuff like World War II and you're just like, wow, like the stakes were so high. Everything was so clear for these people. And of course, like, would people fight for your country in the same way in today's world? It's nuanced and it's different, of course. But yeah, it's something I think about a lot and I don't really have good answers. How do you think about that?

[11:45] Dom Francks: Well, what comes to mind for me is, there's a beautiful podcast called The Emerald Podcast that's this really well-produced exploration of how mythology affects the modern world. And they did an episode called War and Ritual Ecstasy that was essentially all about how particularly young men need an experience of like intense hardship in order to essentially forge them into people that can engage helpfully and healthfully in society. And if we don't have that, the society will create that through war. Now, that's a thesis. I don't know if that's actually true, but my experience has been that the, like, there is a reason that, like, many of the most formative moments of my childhood were in sports. It's definitely manufactured.

It's— I'm not trying to compare that to the experience of going to war, but there are similar elements of brotherhood and shared purpose and physicality. I think there's a physicality piece that's really important. And I think honestly, that's part of the reason that I still feel so drawn to moving my body through the natural world and going and doing hard things. Another great book, The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter, which I think does a great job of arguing this point, is that we, we have to go do hard things. And I think particularly Young men need to go do hard things in order to come more fully into the world and be humbled and also have that experience of being fully alive. I mean, that's what I remember from the book Tribe is a lot of what was so hard for veterans coming back from combat zones is that nothing else felt as high stakes.

Nothing else felt like it mattered. Like, how do you get yourself to care about getting the promotion or like who wins the Super Bowl when you lived for some large period of time when like your decisions literally meant life and death for you and the people around you. So, you know, while I don't have firsthand experience in that, I do have like an appreciation for the more civilian ways of experiencing hardship and how that can bring like a deeper meaning and a deeper like inhabitation of life.

[13:59] Paul: Yeah, a lot of people will say things to me like, Well, I don't, I don't want to like leave my job or do my own thing. Like, what am I supposed to do? Or what if I don't make enough money? Or what, what if it's like, yeah, exactly.

[14:18] Dom Francks: So yeah, yeah, yeah.

[14:21] Paul: Well, and I think this surprised me. It, it sort of became a feature, like all those things, like the fears. Like by the time I left, I was so happy. To leave and just blow up my life. But what I realized is all these insecurities and uncertainties, they don't actually disappear. You just sort of learn to dance with them and then you start to see them as a feature, right?

I don't know what I'm gonna do to support my family in a couple of years, but that almost feels more natural in a weird way that's really hard to explain. And, uh, I, I probably could also just solve this by spending more time in nature, maybe. Yeah.

[15:05] Dom Francks: I mean, there's a, there's a desire to be confronted with the, the felt sense of the fragility that is always with us. Like we are inherently fragile and there's nothing that we can do to, to actually make ourselves safe. Um, and, and when you're really face to face with that, that can help you gain clarity on how beautiful and precious life is. Um, and this is part of why, you know, so many traditions have some sort of rite of passage, some sort of intensely difficult thing that in many traditions you actually do run the risk of death. Uh, in the modern world, that's much less common. Um, but there is a sense of, okay, if you go through this, this crucible, you're going to come out the other side and recognize what really matters and recognize that nothing's actually guaranteed to you.

Yeah.

[15:54] Paul: Did you have any of these sort of experiences growing up?

[15:59] Dom Francks: Growing up, I didn't go through any particularly intense rites of passage. I had some very formative moments and some moments that shaped my experience of what matters in the world. But in the last 3 years, I did a year-long program with the Animus Valley Institute. Which has been guiding wilderness-based vision quests and rites of passage for the last 40 years. And so did some work with them around vision fasting and the experience of taking steps towards discovering a life purpose or a reason for being here that don't involve trying to figure it out rationally. And that was, I think, it's similar to what you talk about with The Pathless Path.

That was like the key that unlocked my sense of both fully belonging in the world, regardless of what I was doing in the world, and unlocked my actual creativity and sense of what are the gifts that I really have to offer was the ability to have a pathway that wasn't just me journaling and writing about it and trying to strategically and rationally figure it out, but instead allowing inspiration to come from other sources, namely the natural world.

[17:17] Paul: Yeah. And you've, you've always sort of had this inclination towards nature. Where did that come from?

[17:24] Dom Francks: I mean, growing up in Olympia, we spent a lot of time camping. So the concept of being outside is not a new one to me. And I was actually recently listening to a podcast with Alexa Firmenich and Nate Hagens on The Great Simplification podcast. And They're talking about how those— there's a— it's when you have children that are exposed to the natural world, there's like a neuronal connection that gets wired of safety and connection and essentially goodness that was wired very young for me. Like the experience of being in forest, the experience of sleeping outside felt like something that was safe and rejuvenating. And then I had a decade where I essentially spent like every waking hour playing golf.

And so there was a decade where I didn't do a whole lot of exploring in the wild. But I think it was my freshman or sophomore year of college when I was still playing golf a lot. I spent 3 days climbing a mountain called Mount Shuksan in Washington with my dad and a bunch of family friends. And that experience was really foundational for me in getting back into the motivation to spend time in not just the natural world, but for me particularly, the mountains are like the place that I come most alive. And that experience of being up on a glacier, working together in a team, feeling the wind on my skin, and being able to have that vantage point of seeing so much of the world at once was deeply inspiring to me and really moved me even through like the next couple of years where I was still spending pretty much all the time that I spent outside on a golf course.

[19:01] Paul: Yeah. And so talk to me about like being in college, you're competing golf, but you're also at a place like Stanford, which is just an amazing place to be for ideas and idealism and being in California. Like what, what was some of your, what were some of your initial experiences in terms of following your curiosity towards deeper alignment with nature and those sorts of things?

[19:29] Dom Francks: So yeah, in college, I'd say my worldview could be summed up in like, if I don't play professional golf, then the most important thing to work on is our relationship to the natural world. And that's always felt clear to me ever since I had like a really powerful experience in 6th grade that really put me on that track. And I was still a really motivated athlete and could see a world where I could use the platform of being a successful professional golfer to be an activist and use that as it would be sort of a modified version of effective altruism. Like if I can use this thing to get famous and then be like the environmental activist golfer, that could actually be like the greatest impact that I could have. That was maybe how I rationalized it.

I also just like loved the experience of legitimately getting to be world-class at something and having the potential of like, if I work hard enough at this, there's actually no ceiling. And that was an incredibly addictive feeling for me in high school and college. And yeah, Stanford, a few things happened for me. One, like I remained convinced that Stanford is the best place in the world to go to school if you can manage to get in there. Because it's incredibly high achievement, but not high competition was my experience of it. And there's like a vast diversity of people that are just phenomenally good at all sorts of different things.

Like in my freshman dorm, we had like kids who had published a physics paper when they were 14 and kids who were virtuosic violin players and Olympians. And there was just a sense of like, possibility that was really incredible. Like everyone was phenomenal at something. And yet we were all very much on the same team, which talking to folks that went to other schools, I, I've heard stories of like more competition. So that was really beautiful. And it really took me a little while and probably didn't happen until after college for me to really figure out the game that I was actually setting myself up to play.

Like, I think in college I had the privilege for most of the time to have it be very clear what game I was playing, and that game was to be the best athlete that I could. And then when I decided not to turn pro and was working as a software engineer at a solar company, I really had the realization of like, okay, well, this is what this path looks like. This is, you know, if I could do this for the next, this or something like it for the next 30 or 40 years. And the way that I understand it now of what, what was so challenging for me around that was that I was essentially expected to be like a code production machine. And I was like an 80th percentile software engineer. Like I could, I could have been a perfectly good software engineer and like followed that path, but I just couldn't, I couldn't get myself to care.

Like I couldn't get myself to care about the new front end framework. And I was like, there are so many people in the world that could do this way better than I can, or at least just as good. And I think from being at Stanford and having the sense of like both having an experience of myself being really phenomenal and world-class at something, that was golf, and seeing so many people around me that had that, I was like, well, why don't I take a crack at being great at something else? Um, and that was maybe part of the energy that drove me to leave and set off a whole wild journey.

[22:40] Paul: Yeah. Where'd you go from there?

[22:42] Dom Francks: I took some time off without a huge amount of a plan, but the formative experience that happened in that first time when I stepped away from that job is I took a month-long course with NOLS, which is the National Outdoor Leadership School, on the glaciers of the North Cascades in Washington. And so this was a month of being in a group of 12 people in the high alpine environment, learning both technical mountaineering skills and also a bunch of leadership skills. And it just was absolutely incredible. I fell completely in love with wilderness education. I was so inspired by my two instructors and just remember feeling this sense of like, we got out of the mountains and I was like, I don't want to go back after being off the grid for a month. And that was a pretty strong signal for me.

And so then I sort of— I tried really hard to figure out how to make a pivot into outdoor education and ended up working as an Outward Bound instructor in the years after that, which is a similar school that does, does wilderness education. And yeah, so that, that essentially that experiment of I wonder what it's like to go spend a month with NOLS and the way that I thought about it at the time was worst case, I learn a bunch of cool mountaineering skills. Best case, I learned that like this is a possible career path that's really inspiring to me. And it was a hell of a bet.

[24:04] Paul: Yeah, well, well, was it a bet? I mean, you sort of sensed you were giving up on this, like, software engineering path. Was it just like, I need to go try stuff, or was it like, I need to make this work, I need to find a replacement path?

[24:21] Dom Francks: No, I wasn't giving up on it at the time. And, you know, in the years since, I've had other jobs, not as a software engineer, but working at climate-focused tech companies. So the way I describe it is like I've had parallel careers for the last decade or so, both working in climate tech and as a wilderness guide. And they've like sometimes coexisted, sometimes alternated, but it's been like a permeable membrane. And so it never felt to me like I was burning a bridge or really like turning my back on something. I mean, one of the blessings of, at least at that time, software engineering, I'm not sure how things are changing with AI making it far easier to write code, but at that time it was sort of like, if you're a reasonable software engineer, you probably always get a job.

And so there was this sense of like, the floor is pretty high and I was able to feel that, I think partially because I'd seen my parents do it. Like I'd seen my parents take a bunch of time away and come back and still have perfectly successful and happy careers. Um, so I sort of knew that like the floor wasn't that high, so it didn't feel that scary to me. And, um, you know, I believe you talk about this in The Pathless Path, like you don't have to just like quit and burn the bridge and just immediately figure out what's next. For me, it has been sort of a, like, uh, having a foot in both worlds for a long time. Before figuring out the way to step more fully into maybe a Pathless Path or a different path.

[25:46] Paul: Yeah. Did you have a mental model or something set up in your head where you're like, okay, I'll go do a contract gig for 3 months, or I'm working part-time and this is going to support the exploration and going back and forth?

[26:01] Dom Francks: That is what I ended up doing. I don't know that that was ever actually the plan. And like, I had a, I had a really intense— Yeah, go ahead.

[26:10] Paul: Was there like a constraint? Like, okay, I'm not going back full-time permanently, or like, what was the constraint? Did this like shaping how you were thinking about mixing work and setting things up?

[26:23] Dom Francks: At that time, I was so clear that I wanted to take the next step towards trying to be a wilderness educator. And I was doing like the main thing that I was doing was getting all of the, like getting certifications, getting field experience and sending out like a million applications. And then I was also contract software engineering in order to subsidize because at the time I was making more per hour contract software engineering than I was making per day as an hourly analyst. So very, very different financial reward. But, you know, I don't think I've ever had like a plan so clearly. And there was actually a moment, um, in like February 2020 when I was deciding whether to go back for a second season at Outward Bound.

That was one of the deepest pits of anxiety in my life because I felt this really intense dichotomy of like, either I go back to Outward Bound and do the thing that really lights me up that I love doing, but I had the story that that wasn't scalable enough and that I needed to do something that was going to have more climate impact. Like at the time I was sort of judging the worthiness of my life by like the amount of carbon that I caused to not be in the atmosphere. And I was like, Hourbound, yeah, I'm like, I'm great at it. It lights me up, but like, I don't, uh, that's not scalable enough. And then the other option was to essentially go back into some sort of climate tech focus role, which is what I ended up doing. There was a little bit of a forcing function because COVID shut down the entire Hourbound season that year.

And then I got incredibly burned out in climate tech. And so it's been a little bit of a back and forth and I've sort of had to go back to the, call it maybe default path or maybe a better way is like path that's a lot easier to explain to people at a wedding. Yeah, a few times before recognizing like, man, like this, this still doesn't feel like it. And the thing that lit me up the most, even on a bad day, was guiding in the wilderness. Like, the worst day guiding in the wilderness was still generally better than the average day doing anything else.

[28:29] Paul: Yeah, that's awesome. And that's something I see with so many people. It's that from the outside, it may not make any sense, but it's very clear you knew where you were headed, or at least you had a feeling that you were in the wrong place at certain times. And it's like, okay, just keep protecting this connection to nature. I don't know where it's going to end up going. And A thing I see often too is especially people in environmental work and sustainability work, they end up in these positions inside companies and it leads to these crisis moments.

I talked to somebody who was doing CSR at Amazon and for her it was just, it just elevated this tension between like the nonsense they were saying in like the corporate work and like the reality of like the like basic stuff she just wanted to help with. Did you experience some of that as well? Like you go work in like solar climate tech and it's like, okay, finally I work in the thing. But then you realize like, okay, 50% of my time I'm doing like some random stuff or other things like that.

[29:42] Dom Francks: Yeah, it's a hard balance. And actually I wrote a whole piece about this on, on Substack that was sort of Why we need the wild, uh, when I was launching a, uh, a wilderness immersion, particularly for climate leaders and folks working in climate tech. Yeah, it's, it's a hard dichotomy and it's, it's really difficult to square the circle because many, not all, but many people that get into wanting to work on environmental issues feel some strong connection to the natural world and then end up finding themselves sitting behind a screen all day. And that drove me crazy. And I can get back to like, I think that the screen part is a little more nuanced. I think it wasn't actually the screen as much as like just doing things that I didn't feel excited about, but Um, it's a hard balance, right?

Because like all, all the jobs that I've had in climate-focused tech companies, like mission-driven companies, I want them to succeed. This is work that needs doing. Uh, I feel that it's not the work that I'm supposed to be here to do. I think there's people out there that can do it better than me. So it's a, it's a hard balance. And I, I think right now I, with the work that I'm doing currently, like I can see a pathway towards really beautiful, scalable impact.

It doesn't look like necessarily less carbon, but it does look like being a small part of the transition in our orientation to the natural world that I think is foundational to us addressing any of our environmental problems. And I see more and more people who are actually really steeped in the numbers and the nitty-gritty of climate modeling, the geopolitical situation, essentially coming back and saying the same thing, like, we're not going to solve this unless we see ourselves as embedded in the more-than-human world rather than separate. And so if I can be a small part of that transition, then that's, uh, that feels worth doing. But it's not that the work that I was doing before is not helpful.

[31:29] Paul: It is, right?

[31:30] Dom Francks: It just wasn't lighting me up, right?

[31:33] Paul: Yeah. And I think this is such a tricky balance because it's like we want to care about X, but then we go find job in X and we actually suck at job X, or we just don't like that, right? And then eventually you're just going to sort of become a grumpy person. And at a basic level, you just sort of need to be engaged with the world. Um, I'd love to hear more about this, like measuring your identity around carbon. Like, it feels like there's more there.

[32:04] Dom Francks: Yeah, I remember doing a coach training with the Conscious Leadership Group in 2021. They wrote a book called The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. Really phenomenal work. And they were having us do this practice called Teach the Class, where you essentially teach the class on how to create the conditions in your life that you say you don't want. And the thing that I did was I was like, okay, how to be perpetually dissatisfied with your career 101. Here we go.

Like Professor Franks here to just drop some knowledge. And the first thing—

[32:34] Paul: I want to see this course.

[32:35] Dom Francks: Oh, it's phenomenal. I mean, that is one of my favorite, uh, we could talk more about the teach the class practice. It's phenomenal. But the first thing to do, the number one thing to do to guarantee you're going to be perpetually dissatisfied with your career is make yourself implicitly responsible for an existential global problem and say that you're not doing enough and you're not, you're not a success unless that problem is solved. And that's what it felt like to me. And that was not rational.

If someone was to ask me like, Dom, is that how you feel? I'd be like, of course not. Like, I can't do it alone. In my body, that's what it felt like. And so that was part of why I was perpetually couldn't get myself to actually settle into something because it was sort of like, if our, if our ecological problems aren't fixed, then I'm not doing enough. And that seems unlikely to lead to A, my best work, or B, an enjoyable life.

So that specific practice is when it really like illuminated that for me. And since then, I've really recognized like I need to back off on this or, or, or yeah, it's just not going to lead anywhere good.

[33:46] Paul: I think it's such a hard thing to balance. I mean, when I left the corporate world, I was just like, the corporate world is evil. We need to tear this down. It's broken. But there's almost a flaw in the thinking of like X is broken. And then the real danger is you're super uncertain, you're mad at the system.

So you're like, well, I'm going to fix it. Right. And you don't really— I think for me, I didn't really explore enough to get to know myself and get to know like, where can I contribute to the world? And it was only through finding a certain work where I think I was able to transcend that. And as I deepen my relationship with writing, which I think is really something I can do well and that I can commit to for the next 30 years, a lot of that stuff sort of like softened, right? And now I sense I'm able to have more impact 'cause I can sort of laugh about it.

It's like, yeah, of course the corporate world's broken. But, and I can, like, I can say that without all the heaviness. And, and maybe we attract more people, maybe we— I don't know. But I think it's so hard to transcend that. Like, what did it feel like for you to sort of shift to that new relationship? How's that showing up for you now?

[35:10] Dom Francks: I mean, I think the question that you asked of Something around like, what am I uniquely good at? Or what could I see myself continuing to do for a very long time? I mean, the other thing that I want to bring in here, which I've been thinking about a lot recently, is, um, uh, Steve Marche has created this, uh, thing called Aletheia Coaching. Um, which is a beautiful framework. And, and one of the things that he talks about is the difference between poetic attunement and technological attunement to the world, but also to yourself. Like, do you view yourself as a piece of technology or a piece of poetry?

I think part was part of what was so challenging for me in most of my roles in climate tech companies is I was, I was being asked to relate to myself as a piece of technology, most dramatically when I was a software engineer, but in other roles also, whereas when I'm guiding in the wilderness or when I'm coaching, I can relate to myself and relate to the world as a piece of poetry. And we can bring to bear all of these disparate parts of ourselves. Like, for example, when I'm, guiding in the wilderness, I'm simultaneously tracking the weather and tracking our route and thinking about the interpersonal dynamics in the group and thinking about my dynamic with my co-instructor and thinking about what we're going to facilitate that evening.

Uh, and also trying to like make sure that I'm, you know, stepping on guiding a track through the loose rocks that is going to be safe for, you know, all the folks that are on this trip to walk through. And it's just this level of engagement that's totally different than what I've experienced in other roles. And it's also immersed in the physical world. There's like a physicality and a three-dimensionality to it that just lights me up so much. And I'm like, yeah, I could, like I said before, like the worst day, obviously you could have a really, really bad day, but most, most bad days wilderness guiding are going to be, are going to be better to me than average days or even good days doing other things.

And so How do I then lean into that and trust that if I can find the thing that I might be uniquely positioned to offer to this world and then bring my grounded ethics in what is good for the earth to bear towards that and find a way to like be able to live a unique life that I'm proud of, um, rather than narrowing myself down to like a piece of technology. You could even think about it like I was maybe relating myself to a piece of carbon-removing technology before, and that didn't feel particularly satisfying.

[37:42] Paul: When you soften your attachment to that script, did you notice over time that more people are sort of gravitating to where you are now? I mean, just like personally in your life, like, are you attracting more energy? This is something I always see, like, once people sort of start leaning towards their mission, like, interesting things just start emerging around them?

[38:05] Dom Francks: I think that there has been definitely a sense of— I underestimated the degree to which me actually liking my work would make me better at it. That sounds very simple, but like, I think for a long time—

[38:18] Paul: I don't think it is simple. I think a lot of people— I don't think a lot of people understand that. I think this is why I love exploring these things.

[38:26] Dom Francks: I mean, I'm having the experience right now where like many mornings like, you know, in the last couple of weeks I've actually been sleeping really poorly, but not because I'm anxious, because I'm really excited. Like I have so many ideas going on about like the projects I'm launching and the clients that I'm working with that I am needing to like actually really invest in deepening my meditation practice and like, you know, being able to wind down. And that has never been a problem before. And so there's a feeling of, yeah, just like being more connected to this sense of aliveness. That I think, yeah, is, is to some degree attractive to people around me. I think I've always had this part of me that like when I get on a roll or when I get going or when I'm passionate about something like, um, I feel like I'm just stabilized in it a little bit more right now than I have been in the past.

But there have certainly been moments in the past when I've like connected to it and I've definitely seen the response of the world around me when I'm really lit up. And so I think, yeah, I'd say it's been part of my experience, but it hasn't felt like a night and day shift because it doesn't feel totally new, just more consistent.

[39:34] Paul: By the way, we should bring up the fact that you're in a van right now at the base of a mountain. This is the first guest on The Pathless Path, I think I've done like 170 episodes, that is shooting their video from the base of a mountain in a van, which is just awesome. I love this. I need to explore nature. With this podcast a little more.

[39:58] Dom Francks: Yeah. I mean, worth saying on that front, this chapter in my life, I feel excited about being able to be nomadic and navigate through various mountainous parts of the world and, and be able to do my work easily. I don't think that it's necessarily like the thing to aspire to. There's so many ways of building deep connection with the natural world.

[40:23] Paul: Yeah, you don't need to qualify. This is The Pathless Path podcast. All my listeners are unconventional path weirdos who just want more ideas about how to do things like this.

[40:34] Dom Francks: I think it's the reason, you know, I'm not— the reason that I say this and the reason that I, that I want to make sure this gets in there is that I think it's very easy to be like, oh, I'm, I'm in like this one place and I feel stale and maybe it's not the exact place I want to be in and like Maybe once I get a van and travel around, then I can feel wild and feel connected to nature. And, and that's a big part of like, I disagree with that. I think we can find wildness and connection to the natural world and deep belonging with the natural world almost wherever we are. Certainly harder in like the middle of New York than it would be elsewhere. Harder, not impossible. Um, and I, I just think it's important to not um, to recognize that we're always embedded in nature, whether you're in a van or not.

[41:22] Paul: Yeah, I was writing about something like this the other day. I had this experience a year after I quit my job in Boston. I'd been living there on and off for like, I don't know, 8 years. And I'm walking through the public garden with a friend, and she points out, do you ever look at the trees? She goes. I'm like, What about the trees?

She's like, every single tree in this park is different. I'm like, what? She's like, they imported all these trees from around the world and every tree is from a different country. I'm like, that is crazy. And like, it was sort of this waking up moment for me. And it was this clear signal like, Paul, you have not been paying attention.

Right. Like, and every time I've gone through that park since, it's just like, I have to sit down and sort of like look around. It's so amazing. But, uh, yeah, this seems like such a hard challenge in today's world. Like, I noticed it even, like, I visited Boulder a few weeks ago and I realized, oh, I've been in Austin for 2 months. I'm, I'm just not as connected.

It's hard. You forget, like, we're just part of this silly rock. Yeah. Are there, like, simple ways people can, like, open that portal to connecting in a simpler way? Like, do you give people homework assignment? Like, go do X?

[42:56] Dom Francks: Yeah. I mean, so within the— so I'll just explain this a little bit. So I run the Vivify Regenerative Leadership Program, which is a a 4-month-long coaching program based around a week-long backpacking trip in the High Sierras. And throughout the entire program, one of the commitments that the members of Vivify make is to make some offering to the natural world every day. And that could look like when you're on a walk outside and there's a tree on the sidewalk next to you, pausing and putting your palm on the tree and taking a few deep breaths. And essentially remembering and bringing attention to the fact that we're totally connected to the natural world all the time, no matter where we are.

100%, again, in this other podcast, 100% of our economy is dependent on the natural world. Um, and, and 100% of like our life is dependent on the natural world. And so just bringing attention to that, um, it could look like burying a couple of leaves of tea or a small morsel of food in the ground. This is something that I love to do, like right before I go for a hike or a backcountry ski. You know, this is— there's many, many traditions that are really put a lot of emphasis on offering. And I think I'm a believer that even if you don't know the exact right protocols or it doesn't come from a deep lineage, like just coming with the right intention and just trying to trying to remember and remind yourself of our connection to the natural world can be meaningfully consciousness shifting.

And it doesn't have to be like massively upending your life. It could be, yeah, walk down the street, put your palm on a tree, take a couple of breaths, bury a couple of leaves of tea in the ground. That's an easy way to start.

[44:45] Paul: I love that. Yeah, it reminds me of the time I spent in Bali. They make an offering every day. So everywhere you're walking around on the entire island, there's these little offering trays out every morning. And there's just something about it when you're surrounded by that. There's just this deeper connection.

I mean, not to mention you're just, you're just staring at greens of trees and rice fields and all these things and ants in your apartment and things. And you're just like, You're in the mix. And I, I think this is why people connect with places like that. And like in Asia, this is just much more common to be sort of invaded by outside nature. Yeah, I don't even want to use the word invaded, but it's like you're just so much more connected.

[45:41] Dom Francks: You don't have the illusion of separation.

[45:44] Paul: Yeah. And then even it's even simple things like our fruit. I don't know where our fruit comes from in the US, but I know in Taiwan when I was living there, I walked to the corner and this is like, it would just be like Southern Island pineapple. And they drove it up that morning. And it's like, you know exactly where that's from. And there's just a deeper connection there.

And we've definitely lost that a bit, I think.

[46:14] Dom Francks: Yeah, there's, um, there's a word. So there's the word the Anthropocene, which is, uh, the, the geological epoch that we're in now where humans are the dominant force changing the climate. Um, but there's also a word, uh, that was coined by a biologist, E.O. Wilson, called the Eremocene, which means the age of loneliness. And this has to do with like both the fact that we're having, um, a sixth mass extinction. Like, we're losing tons of species.

And we as humans, many of us in the world, are removing ourselves from that sense of daily interaction with non-human species. Um, like, many of us have pets. We feel really connected to them. Why is that? We feel that connection with a species that's non-human, but so much of the rest of our society is really disconnected from the other, the rest of the tapestry of life on this planet. And so maybe when I hear you talk about your experience in Bali of like the exuberance of the rainforest and the total hopelessness of keeping ants out of your house, like you just, you can't pretend to keep this like sterile box around you and you're hopelessly and joyfully enmeshed in the ecology that you're in.

And that's always the case. We're always enmeshed in an ecology. We just get really good at pretending that we're not, but it harms us. And that's really what like the concept of the eremicene is about.

[47:49] Paul: Yeah. How does it harm us?

[47:53] Dom Francks: I think that so much of the, you said the inspiration crisis, the meaning crisis. Are like skyrocketing problems with mental health. There's a lot of factors here. Technology is a big one, but I also think part of it is like a sense of feeling disconnected from like where our bodies grew up in— not grew up, evolved. Like we evolved to be stimulated by the wind and the leaves and to need to be finely attuned to what was happening in our environment. And like, The environment like that I'm in right now in this van, talking to you on this screen, like I'm happy to be here, but like, it's so much less stimulating than the environment that the human body evolved in.

And I think that there's a sense of like, we, we feel dull and we feel stale because we're, we're overstimulated in one very particular way, but we're understimulated in so many other ways. And so much of that is, is, is not feeling in, in relationship with the species around us. And this is why, like, I think that extended time in the wilderness is so foundational, um, to maintaining a sense of balance and clarity with, like, how we want to be in this world. So there's this concept of the nature pyramid, which comes up in The Comfort Crisis, but also is from a neuroscientist, I believe, at MIT. And it's like these three sort of thresholds that cause psychological and physiological shifts in our body. When we connect with the natural world.

So 20 minutes, ideally every day, but like 5 times a week. So that could be like walking in that park in Boston that has all the different trees. That causes a meaningful downregulation. Then there's 5 hours once a month. So going on like a longer hike, that gives us even more space to shed and drop. And then the one that I'm most interested in is the 3-day effect.

So when you're in the wilderness for 3 days, there are like notable physiological and psychological changes where you, you sort of like are far enough away from your default life that you're able to like open and relax. And you start to just feel a sense of, of this is how life is now. Like I am just an animal walking through this environment. And so within Vivify, when we do the week-long trip, there's a reason that it's, it's 6 or 7 days long is because it's important to marinate in that 3-day effect. But that 3-day effect is really hard to get in the world that we're in because it's more— it's even more than a long weekend. So you really have to be intentional about creating it.

And what's interesting is that, you know, there have been scientific studies around it, but like, this is also a phenomenological or like anecdotal thing that Knowles and Outward Bound instructors talk about all the time. It's like, ah, you know, the group didn't quite come together until day 3. They're like, oh, you know, like, it's not until day 3 that everything really like settles. And this is what I've experienced guiding in Patagonia and Alaska and all over the place is like there is something special that happens on day 3. And I think part of it is we start to like allow the stimulation in that we've been missing so much. That's 360 degrees and all 5 senses lit up all the time rather than being like hyperfocused on just the one thing.

[51:02] Paul: Man, there's so much I want to explore. It's, it's something I think about a lot. Something I've explored is leisure and this lost, basically contemplative state, right? And you read throughout history and people talk about this, people invoke it in nature too. And we don't even think of leisure as this contemplative state. We think about it as watching Netflix, but I didn't experience it until I moved abroad, like in a deep way.

And in my first month of living in Taiwan, I didn't have any work to do. So I sort of had to wander and just sort of be in this new environment. And it happened like, it's something I've like really struggled to articulate because like you can intellectually say like, oh, I knew I wanted to work in this new direction and then I made money and then it works. It's like, No, I experienced a radical shift in my state of being from walking around without a plan. And that state convinced me to continue to cultivate that feeling and sort of build a life around it. But to somebody that hasn't experienced that, it's just, it's so hard to explain.

I love the 3-day experience. Like, does that jolt people? Does it shock them sometimes?

[52:32] Dom Francks: I would actually use the word like, like it's maybe more feels like a gradual opening rather than a jolt or a shock. I mean, certainly there could be like some bumps in the road when you're— if you haven't spent a lot of time outside, there's a lot of new things. You're sleeping outside. It can be a little bit uncomfortable for the first couple of nights, but it's part of why it's great to go with a group and with a guide. Like I've taught many people how to sleep in a sleeping bag and stay warm. There's a bunch of like little practical things that are really helpful.

Um, but you said something earlier that I wanted to touch in on about wandering. And that's a word that I think is really important here. Um, so in, in the way that Animus Valley Institute explains this and works, we do a lot of what are called wanders. And what that is, is moving through a wild or wildish place. Without a clear destination, being guided by your intuition, but also with a sense of like some sort of orientation you want to have towards the world around you or ceremony you want to enact. So really simple version of this is to go for a wander in a wild place.

So this is not a hike. This isn't like, I'm going to get to the top of that mountain and then come back down. This is like, I'm going to walk and allow myself to be guided by my belly button. And allow myself to be guided by the intuition of where I want to go, but walk as if all the other beings and creatures around you are aware of you and happy that you're there. And just try that on for a couple of hours as you allow yourself to move exactly the way that you want to move through a park, through, um, the national forest nearby, wherever it is. And that is an amazing way of opening your perceptions.

I don't know if it's necessarily leisure in the way that you're talking about it, but I found like just simple practices like that. Like I had spent a lot of time hiking and trying really hard and rock climbing and skiing, and I still love those things. And wandering was a totally new thing for me and it was life-changing.

[54:37] Paul: This is— that's so funny. I— when people ask, how can I improve my relationship to work? I actually start with, I say, go 2 hours, wander somewhere without a destination. And people are sort of shocked at that. But the whole point of that is basically just to sort of, yeah, you just loosen into yourself a little more and it's all about just getting to know yourself. And when I use leisure, like if you look back in history, people saw leisure as active.

To. So it was this active, engaged state, and it was about this deeper connection, right? And this contemplative state can be like moving. So yeah, I think it still can apply to nature. It's just we don't— we've sort of corrupted that word. It doesn't really mean anything anymore.

So people are listening and like, I'm like fired up. I want to come on the the 7-day retreat now, but who's it for? Like, what— who are you building this for? Who do you have in mind that you want to lead and how are you thinking about these sort of experiences?

[55:50] Dom Francks: Yeah, I mean, I think Vivify, you know, I've been saying this for a long time and I think it's very aligned with the people that are curious about The Pathless Path. It's really designed for folks who are, you know, in the first third, maybe first half of their career, and it's essentially enough to like have some professional success get a taste of like, cool, this is what it looks like. This is what it feels like. Is this really the game that I want to play? And who are yearning for more adventure and deeper connection to nature and possibly like a reconnection to nature. Like I often have conversations with people where folks had a really powerful experience when they were in high school or in like their, you know, a freshman dorms orientation trip or whatever it is.

But they're like missing that and they don't feel like they have the the time and space to carve that out. And then also folks who are really curious about what the work and way of being in the world that might both light them up the most and also be in meaningful service to the world, um, is, you know, the three pillars of Vivify are rapturous presence, integrated wildness, and courageous agency. And the courageous agency piece is really around being able to look fully at the crises in our world, of which there are many. And hold them and take authentic action. That doesn't have to be upending your entire life, but essentially reckoning with them rather than pretending they don't exist.

So Vivify is really designed for folks who are not necessarily contemplating like a massive life transition, but who are looking for more aliveness and want to bring the aliveness that they find in the natural world into their daily lives. So that we can, like, live a life that both we enjoy and that we would be proud to tell our grandchildren about.

[57:33] Paul: That's awesome. And how are you pairing, like, the coaching? I love the model you're doing. How are you thinking about, like, the event with the coaching? It seems like you're doing, like, sort of bringing the group together virtually and then convening in the wilderness, which is just a really cool approach.

[57:51] Dom Francks: Yeah, there's, there's two factors here. One is I've guided a lot of standalone wilderness trips and they're beautiful and really meaningful. And I think the lack of both preparation and integration is really missing in terms of making it as, as lasting an experience as, as it can really be. And the most meaningful programs that I've been in in my life, Animus Valley Yearlong is one of them, are like longer form group programs. There's something powerful that happens. When you're with a group and watching each other go through a journey together.

And so Vivify is really around creating that tight community where we're walking through these questions of what does it mean to be able to offer our attention to the things that matter most in our life? What does it mean to take a stand and say, we're going to connect more fully with the natural world right where we are and embed ourselves in the ecology of our place? And what does it mean to just be in the question of What does a courageous act look like for me? And then we provide tons of support and practices, tons of things to unlock the wisdom of our imagination. This is again, like one of the most powerful things about the Animus Valley Institute for me was learning ways of discovery and knowing that aren't trying to figure it out rationally, which I'm really good at, but has made it really easy for me to keep trying that path. So we bring in these, these more embodied practices.

And then we also have a ton of one-on-one support to essentially make sure that like the curriculum that we're moving through is really working for you. And then when we go into the High Sierra, we've already spent 3 months making an offering to the natural world every day. What is your experience like walking into the mountains for a week with this group of people that you've already gotten to know really well? When you've spent 3 months cultivating this sense of, of connection and reciprocity with the wild, I just think that's going to be such a deeper experience than you show up and you're meeting everyone for the first time and you have no preparation or framework. And then we have another month or 2 afterwards to integrate and make sense of what happened up there together.

And so the hope is that by having that, um, longer structure around an intense experience, we can help to rewire some of like the— like our mutual friend Johnny talks about, like, knowledge is a rumor until it lives in the muscle. Well, the hope is like by doing a longer form program, we create more space in order to have that experience live in the muscle and then see what life wants to come through us from there.

[01:00:35] Paul: I love it. Yeah, I love how much you care about this and it comes through. Like, you're very connected to this vision and helping people with this. It is very powerful. I, I sense interesting stuff is going to emerge in the next couple of years with this. You were telling me about following the path.

And how hard that is in the wilderness and how you sort of have to develop an intuition for that. I'd love for you to share a bit more around that because I thought it was a really cool metaphor for life.

[01:01:14] Dom Francks: Yeah. So in the Sierra, where— which is my favorite place in the world, particularly the High Sierra, which is where the wilderness trip for Vivify is, you have a lot of these high alpine granite basins. So not hugely dense forest. Sometimes there's grass, but a lot of times it's like bare rock or like crumbled decomposed granite. And so finding where the trail is, is often really not very straightforward because you have things that look like they might be a path, little like depressions in the ground. There is a trail, but it's very unclear what it is.

And my experience has been like, you start to get this sort of like Sierra Spidey sense. Of when you're not on the trail and when you are. And like my experience up there is like, you know, me having spent a lot of time up there, I find it easier now to stay on the trail. But oftentimes when I'm up there with folks who haven't spent as much time and they're leading, like every 5 minutes they're off the trail and I sort of have to be like, oh yeah, no, I think, I think there was a turn back there that, that we missed and we needed to like go back and get it. It's one of those things where like most of the time you'll still get where you want to go as long as you don't like get in the wrong valley.

But it's, it's, it has drawn my attention to the subconscious way that by having spent so much time in a place and walking these particular types of paths, I develop a sense for when I'm on and when I'm off. And so I think the metaphor is, uh, in following some sort of a Pathless Path, the more time you spend in it, the more time, the better you are at discerning what's on the path and what's not. And that's different for every person. It's different for every mountain range. The Sierra Spidey sense doesn't actually necessarily translate to the Cascades or the Rockies or anywhere else. And it starts to become a little bit unconscious and it starts to become like a felt sense in the body to me.

Like oftentimes I'll just like, there's no like concrete visual clue. There's just a sense of like, I don't think I'm on the trail anymore. Like, oh, I need to backtrack a little bit. And usually I'm right. So I think, yeah, there's a way of relating to The Pathless Path that's similar.

[01:03:20] Paul: That's beautiful. Who are your path role models?

[01:03:23] Dom Francks: It's a great question, and it's actually the— I mean, more what comes up for me is like, for most of my life, I didn't really have any, and that felt hard. Like, there was a long time where I was like, I don't know if there is a single person that I would fully trade lives with. And that's sort of what I, what I think about is like everything included, would I trade lives with them? Now, who I would say now in terms of like a life well lived, Kim Stanley Robinson is the first name that comes to mind. He's a sci-fi author. He's my favorite author.

He's written many books. One of them, The Ministry for the Future. He wrote The Ministry for the Future, which is his most famous book. I could list other ones, but he also wrote a book most recently called The High Sierra: A Love Story, which is the history of him spending almost a month a year for 40 years backpacking in the Sierra. And it's gorgeous. And so the reason that I feel so drawn to Stan is like, he both made great art.

All of his art is activist. Like, The Ministry for the Future, it like defines the genre of climate fiction. And in the early '90s, he wrote a series called The Mars Trilogy that is like, was for me, incredibly foundational in so many ways about how to think about being an earthling, like through the exploration of thinking about being a Martian. It was really helpful to me to understand like, what does it mean to be an earthling? Um, and he spent like a cumulative 3 years probably backpacking in my favorite place in the world and then wrote this book that's just a beautiful love like an ode to how special those mountains are. And so to see him having created a life where he was also like a stay-at-home dad for a long time.

So to see him create a life where he like made beautiful art, did like made a meaningful dent in the universe, cared for his family, and like pursued consistent adventure and connection to the wild. Like, if I could do that, life well lived.

[01:05:29] Paul: That's beautiful. I definitely want to read that book now. I think in my recent trip to Boulder, I just felt that there's a deeper calling there, at least moving somewhere closer to sort of day-to-day beauty. But I think I want to do some sort of immersion at some, some point in the future. Where else, where else do you want to point people?

[01:05:55] Dom Francks: Yeah. So if you want to learn more about Vivify, domfrancks.com/vivify, they'll give you everything that you need to know. And please reach out.

[01:06:03] Paul: F-R-A-N-C-K-S, Francks.

[01:06:06] Dom Francks: Yes. domfrancks.com/vivify, V-I-V-I-F-Y. And, and please reach out if you're interested. And then the other place is I write periodically on Substack, which is the cleanest distillation of my thoughts around integrated wildness. And that's just Dom Francks, same spelling, substack.com.

[01:06:35] Paul: Beautiful. Anything else you want to leave the audience with?

[01:06:39] Dom Francks: Really just an invitation into, into deeper aliveness. I think that's a cliché thing, but more and more. Like, I was at a wedding last weekend, and so talking to a lot of people about what they're doing professionally, and for many people, I could just feel the, like, drop in energy as soon as they started talking about it. And I guess my invitation is, like, I know from my work with clients, like, you don't actually have to quit your job in order to, like, shake that feeling, but you do have to examine it. And be willing to look at it fully. And I think spending meaningful time in the natural world is an incredible way to remind yourself of like that you truly are just an animal on this planet and that life is very short and spending it doing something that drains your energy, if you have the means to avoid it, is important.

But like, yeah, build a life that brings you alive and show up fully in this world that has many crises.

[01:07:38] Paul: Beautiful. Thank you, Dom. Check out Dom's work. I really appreciate this conversation. I am— I need to go for a walk, I think.

[01:07:47] Dom Francks: Yeah, I really appreciate it, Paul. It's awesome to be here. Thanks so much for a great, great conversation.