Welcome to Most Popular, the podcast about pop culture and the impact it has on society. I'm Dr. Adrienne Trier Bieniek. I'm a professor of sociology, and I will be your host. Today I'm talking with Simon Rinne, who runs an organization in Australia called Mindful Men. It's a therapy practice that's dedicated to supporting men with mental illness and disability.

Simon and I found each other via a podcasting group when I asked if anyone would be interested in talking about gender on my podcast. Simon responded and asked if he could talk about how the Terminator movies and Arnold Schwarzenegger set up a perfect example of unachievable masculinity and, as a child of the 80s.

I would have broken the code of my people if I had said no, Simon and I talk about the ways manhood is presented in pop culture and I get the opportunity to educate him on American football, not the actual game logistics. No, no, no, something more important. The relationship between Travis Kelsey and Taylor Swift and how that led Travis Kelsey to make friendship bracelets for the guys on his team.

Clearly. American football is in great hands with me. I hope you enjoy our conversation. So hi everybody. I'm Simon Rennie. I'm a social worker in the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia. I have a young family, so I've got two little kids. They're three and six. Actually, they're four and six. My, my daughter will kill me for saying that she's three.

And yeah, I've been in Australia my whole life. And. As a social worker, I have my own private practice as well, so I'm a therapist and I provide therapy for boys and men in the mental health and the disability spaces. So yeah, really excited to be here and to chat about things around mental health, masculinity, and how that ties in with what we consume in the media through social media and what you watch on telly.

How did you get into social work? It was a 30, 40 year process. Growing up, I had, I lived with mental health conditions. So from eight years old, live with undiagnosed obsessive compulsive disorder, depression, anxiety. But towards the end of high school, I kind of had this idea in my head that I wanted to work in the mental health space, wanted to work with people just like me, but.

Back in the noughties or late nineties, we didn't really have words for mental health, or at least not where I grew up. So I didn't know what mental health was because what I was living with was undiagnosed until I was 28. And that's when I finally discovered what these mental health things were. So I kind of went to university, started a bit of a psychology degree, didn't quite work out, ended up in anthropology, so majoring in anthropology.

Ended up having a public service career because I didn't know what an anthropologist did. So that's kind of the only way that I went. And then as I got into my thirties and I knew a lot about mental health by then, I wanted a career shift. And I said, yes, now I know what mental health is. I know how to pursue that kind of career.

And I found social work through. Essentially going to my local university and talking about it with a careers counselor and saying this is kind of what I want to do. And yeah, social work kind of stuck out to me because it gave me a lot of creative freedom, which is something that I had yearned for. I loved creativity growing up.

And I didn't really want to be stuck in a clinic for six sessions a day. I wanted to be able to. Yeah. Do my work in a very flexible way. And so that's why social work stood out for me. And that's what I did. I did it as a mature age student as a master's degree and finished that a couple of years ago.

So yeah, I've been doing social work for about two years now. So you took, what did you do when you did public sector? I did a range of things. So I, I initially started as a graduate in some completely random. Government department that had things like communications, I had information technology, had the arts, I had sport all boxed into one, but I just, I just didn't like that.

I kind of had this idea of being in the sports space because I love sport growing up as an Aussie. We love our sport, but I never got the opportunity to work in that kind of space. But after that first graduate year, I ended up in the Australian sports anti doping authority. So that's kind of like the wider equivalent around the world for anyone who knows professional sport.

And I did a bit of work there. Then I moved into immigration and multiculturalism. And I spent a bit of, I spent quite a lot of years in that kind of area. And then the last four years I was in the national disability insurance agency. So I was actually in disability support. I was fortunate to be the kind of person who could press approve on someone's funding that could access disability support.

So I really loved that role. And then from there, I decided to step out and do my own small business. What's interesting about your path to me and. Why I like this story you're telling is you, you pivoted, you know what I mean, like you, it sounds like you were doing quite a bit and then you said, but there's this just doesn't quite feel feel right yet.

This isn't the fit. So I'm going to pivot and and you didn't take like a hard left, but you definitely took a left turn into a different area. But it sounds like you were using the skills that you had already kind of settled on. Like you just said, you know, I, I liked doing the part where I could press accept on things and that's helpful.

Right. So you just sort of transitioned that into another helpful profession. And I, yeah, there's definitely a lot of skills that were coming out that I could use. And particularly those last four years in the disability space, I spoke to hundreds, if not thousands of people, either on the phone or in person.

That skill set in itself enabled me to then transition into a therapy clinic. And also, I guess that's the professional side, but the personal side, I was also a client of the mental health system. So I knew what it felt like to sit on the couch with a clinician and talk about really difficult stuff. So.

It was, it actually was pretty much a hard left pivot because it was working full time. I was studying my master's degree. We had our kids, we had COVID in that time. So halfway through my degree, we were locked down. So everything was just crazy. And then just dealing with my mental health. It was probably several hard left pivots.

And I actually burnt out during that period. So when I burnt out. Everything was snowballed into a point where I couldn't function. I was totally stressed, stressed out to the max. But I had this drive to keep going. I wanted to be this social worker. I wanted to finish. I wanted to pivot out of that old career that wasn't lighting me up anymore and start something fresh.

So I had this internal burning desire to do something with this, but I had to jump over a lot of hurdles over a long period of time to get to that space. I really appreciate. I mean, of course you burned out. It's not like you took on one thing. You had a lot of irons in the fire, right? Like, of course. And then COVID just makes everything so much easier to deal with.

There's no problems there. So you're in Australia. I'm in the U. S. So. We, I want, I wanted to talk briefly about what you see is the difference between mental health care and in Australia versus the US. And if you need me to fill in gaps, I can definitely do that. I don't want to make you put you on the spot and be like, tell me all the differences.

But what do you, what do you, what do you perceive to be the difference? They're actually quite similar. So I do, I'm a podcast host myself. So I've got the mindful men podcast and I speak to a lot of people from the U. S. and all over the world around mental health and what it was like growing up for them.

You know, I tell my story of growing up in the eighties and nineties and noughties. I was born in 83 and how that period of time influenced the way that I think and feel and behave. And it's interestingly interesting because when I speak to men and women from across the world, they all share very similar stories.

It's all this, these stories around, you know, having to suck it up and be tough and don't talk about emotions and don't talk about feelings. And a lot of the influences were very similar as well. It's around how present are their parents or how do they have positive male role models or female role models.

Did they come from a lower socioeconomic background or a higher socioeconomic background and what did that impact, you know, and, and so they're all very similar, like it's. As I said, it was that suck it up mentality. A lot of it was now in terms of accessing mental health care in Australia, we're quite fortunate.

We have the Medicare system, which allows us to access essentially low subsidized or highly subsidized mental health services. And in some cases, it's free, not in all cases, but some cases it's free, whereas I'm not sure about the US and I'm imagining it's a lot here. A lot of it's you have to pay forward through your private health insurance.

Is that right? Mhm. Yep. If your insurance covers it at all. And a lot of times health insurance will give you X amount of times you can go. So they'll say you have five sessions and then that's it. That's the amount of time amount will cover. But a lot of therapists here because I work with a lot of therapists to a lot of therapists here have stopped taking insurance because there's only so many things they'll cover so many times.

So, you know, if you go in and you say I have we'll say PTSD, right? As an example, if you go in and say, I have PTSD insurance, we'll say we'll cover five sessions. But after that, you have to pay out of pocket or, you know, be cured, which of course is insane. So it's, it's really difficult to access mental health care in the US.

If you don't go through even if you have insurance, sometimes it's not going to cover you. And then if you go some, you can find like nonprofits and things to go through that will cover. Something, but yeah, it's, it's not, it's not great. It's not great. So we have that, we have that subsidized access for 10 sessions per calendar year.

So after that calendar finishes, you can either essentially start your mental health care plan again and go through another 10 sessions. COVID was actually really good because we increased it to 20 sessions so that you can access more mental health care during that period. Outside of that, that's the public system.

And then outside of that, you've got your private health insurance, which may or may not cover mental health care. Most of them tended to cover counseling or psychology, and it doesn't really matter what it's about. It's just as long as you can access a counselor, a psychologist, a social worker, a psychiatrist, all these types of things after those 10 sessions or whatever in the private, in a public sector, you are out of pocket, but it's not as if it's something that is.

Excruciatingly painful in terms of payments because you can get access to cheap stuff, which is around 80 up to several hundreds of dollars. It just depends on what you can afford is really but that safety net through our Medicare system is something that is, we, we really value here in Australia.

Yeah, it is one of the areas that I feel like we need. I mean, there's a lot of areas, but it's one of the areas that I feel like we need a lot of work in the US. You mentioned growing up in the 80s and 90s, so I did too. And I know what our pop culture was in that moment in time. It's funny because you see a lot of stuff popping up now where it's, where people are basically saying, wow, did we screw up the way that we let kids look at TV and movies in the eighties and nineties.

Like you see a lot of stuff coming up about like the way women were treated in films and on things like MTV. So I want to ask, first of all Your organization is mindful men. I want to ask. First of all, if you would talk a little bit about what that is. And then if you could talk about the influence that you think pop culture has had on the ways that folks feel the ways that folks feel about masculinity.

Absolutely. So Mindful Men is a therapy. It's a therapy business. It's a therapy business designed for men and for boys as well. I call it men because I'm a man. And the idea around it came from my own personal pain. So living with undiagnosed Mental health conditions from eight to 28. And then, you know, I still live with these conditions today as a 40 year old.

But just wanting to be that person that I never had to look up to and speak to about mental health conditions. And, and I work across, you know, mental health and disability, primarily psychosocial disability. So conditions like PTSD or schizophrenia, those types, those types of, those types of conditions.

And it's just me is I'm a, I'm a sole trader. I worked by myself and I do therapy differently. So I take therapy out of a clinic. And we go shoot hoops at a basketball ring, or we go get a coffee, or we go for a walk on the beach, we go for a drive, we do all these things that are just different to what a normal therapy session looks like, because I know from personal experience, sitting in a couch, two guys talking, or even you know, If it's hard to find a guy to talk to, talking to somebody else about your deep and personal issues can be really confronting and be really challenging.

And that stops a lot of men and boys from seeking help because they don't know how to talk to someone. But if we change it up and do it in a different way, where we're doing an activity at the same time, it feels less confrontational. And enables boys and men to open up a little bit more easily, easily.

So there's an example, it might be for a younger person sitting and playing video games. And as we're talking about the video game, we can bring in some, Oh, how you've been feeling lately? What's the biggest challenge that's going on for you. And then because we're not looking at each other and we're doing something different, it's, they start to open up a little bit easier, or I've got other guys who just like being in the car and driving, they don't get out of their house.

So going for an hour drive. And, you know, seeing the scenery and talking about stuff and listening to the radio just softens the approach that you might get in a traditional clinic. So that's essentially what I do. And I do it for the reason of trying to be that positive male role model that I never had.

Like, I grew up in a household of, you know, three brothers and my dad and my mom. And. Very hyper masculine, a very alpha male, grew up in a, in a low socioeconomic area in the northern suburbs of Adelaide, which has a lot of welfare, it's a lot of single mom families, it's a lot of drugs, alcohol, you know, we had biker gangs, all that type of stuff.

It lives around us, so it's a very, it's a very scary place to live. It's kind of like the Australia's version of a ghetto type thing. It is, it's a tough place to live. I lived in constant fear, fear of people hurting me, of, of getting in trouble, like, and, and this snowballed and snowballed and snowballed into this thing, this beast that I live with called obsessive compulsive disorder, which is not necessarily about keeping things neat and tidy, if, if anyone knows about OCD, it's about.

For me it's about safeties, locking houses and checking windows are shut and all this type of stuff. It's not as bad as it used to be, but as a 40 year old I still live with the remnants of that today. And through that time we were watching things like Die Hard and The Terminator and Rambo and Predator was the movies of choice for my older brothers.

So I'm the third brother and you know third boy in the family. So a lot of what we watched was dictated by my older brothers. And so I grew up watching these people, these, these hyper masculine heroes, you could say walking through walls of fire or getting stabbed or getting shot and still saving the day.

And, and inside of me, like this is before social media, but inside of me, This started to ingrain this, this notion of what it meant to be a boy and a man is to be tough and to suck it up and to move on and carry on. And that was, I guess, reinforced by that, that environment that I lived in of not feeling safe, even walking outside of my house or not feeling safe at school.

School is one of the most safest places that you can go to. But just not feeling safe, feeling like someone's always out to get me or whatever. And, and the reality of it was that nobody was ever out to get to get me. But my brain told me this, my brain was telling me this to try and keep me safe. And so I do these ritualistic behaviors of checking things a lot, searching for that feeling of safety.

But so you had this television, this television kind of, you know, notion of what it meant to be a boy and a man, and that was reinforced at home. You never talk about your emotions to mom and dad and you'd suck it up. And if your brother beat you up, they would tell you, don't tell mom and dad.

Otherwise I'm going to get you again. So it's reinforcing the home. You see the same stuff at school. I remember, you know, kids would get beat up and, and if they retaliated the, you know, the, the bullies or whatever, they would come back at them again. And, and it was this never ending nightmare really. And then as a, as a sports mad family, we'd also see it on the sports field as well.

So I grew up playing Aussie rules football. So if anyone isn't familiar with that, it's like kind of like NFL, but without the pads and you can get hit from. Anyway, possible. So it's a 360 degree kind of game. It's a big oval. There's no, you don't run at each other's teams. You're running all over the oval.

And if you got hit hard on the footy field and you showed any sort of weakness, you'd be targeted and targeted and targeted again by the, by the opposition team or your coach would say, just, you know, pick it up, suck it up, move on. And so This is what I grew up with, is this constant need to suck it up, to, to be tough, but internally with my OCD and, and then, and, you know, in my teens and my, my early adulthood, anxiety and depression, like I wasn't able to talk about this stuff.

So I felt like a bubbling volcano. Fast forward that to mindful man. And. The same stories are coming out in the work that I do with boys and men today. It's, and for a lot of men, I'm the first person they've ever spoken to about their mental health. This is the first time I always ask on the first session is, have you ever done this thing before?

There's this thing called therapy. Most of them haven't. And then what we're talking about is this. You know, we talk about the current pain or pressure point or what's going on. But then I also go back as a social worker, I like context. So I'm like, tell me your history, tell me your story. And they tell us very similar stories like this of growing up in an environment where they couldn't talk or they were told not to, or, or whatever they consumed on TV or in social media for the young guys these days, or even in video gaming, online gaming as well, it's coming out too.

And they're all very similar stories of that. Suck it up. Be a man. Because. Any sign of weakness, you'd be labeled as, as soft or girly or gay or whatever. And a lot of guys don't want these labels, but, and so they retaliate and they retaliate with anger or they stay bottled things up and they don't sort, they don't talk.

They become emotionless. They turn to alcohol and drugs. They turn to gambling. They get violent some of the guys that I work with have been in and out of prison because of, they just don't know how to express their emotions properly. And they seek, they seek solitude in things that aren't healthy. You know, the drugs, the, the, the, the alcohol, you know, into, into crime and all this type of stuff.

And a lot of it, they're just seeking someone to just hear them out and listen to them and have a safe space to talk. And a lot of it's, you know, so I guess it's, it's, It's at home, it's what we're consuming on TV, what I consume on TV. And then, you know, even at the sports field or in school, it was, it's coming at you from all sorts of angles, this notion of what it means to be a man and to be a boy as well.

And it's crippling for a lot of guys. They can't get away with it. They don't know how to talk. Yeah. So how familiar are you with American football? Not overly from because it's usually in the middle of the night over here for us, but I do know of it. Yes. Okay. So there, I, I know very, very little, mostly I have a lot of opinions about American football, but so, you know, Taylor Swift, right?

Obviously. And she's dating a man named Travis Kelsey who plays for the Kansas city chiefs. So this man created friendship bracelets for his teammates. And it's this, the same kind of theme that, that people have made around Taylor Swift's concerts, but he made them for his teammates and he passed them around and made an Instagram video of him creating them and then handing them out.

And that blew me away because you have this, you know, pinnacle of what we're supposed to look at with masculinity, making these very colorful, very pretty music Bracelets and then the teammates going. This is awesome. I love this. Thank you so much for giving me this right? And it's such a shift and what we've expected.

We're kind of presented as as masculine. Is this notion that friendship bracelets or something that any dude would want to have, you know, because it shows that you're a part of the system. Team. I'm wondering what you see happening with cause you mentioned video games and social media. I'm wondering what trends you see happening there in terms of masculinity with, with the men you've worked with and the boys you've worked with.

Yeah. I'm glad you brought up friendships because male loneliness is our next epidemic here in Australia. I'm not sure what it's like over there. We had some recent reports in our media around so many guys and boys. I say guys, I say men, I mean, boys and men at the same time, Collectively. Of feeling lonely, and I've experienced this more recently as well.

It's because we've had to bottle things up so much. And then we've also got the nomadic lifestyle that we live in these days. We don't live as a lot of us don't live where we grew up. We move around for work or family reasons or whatever. I've lived in about four different Australian states, and I don't live where I grew up.

And. So a lot of guys are lonely. A lot of guys are really struggling with, and they don't know how to show that they're friends with somebody else. It's funny, I met up with a guy recently in the last couple of months for a coffee, through my work actually. And we were just talking and he said to me, Simon, you're a really cool dude and I'd like to be your friend.

And I'm just like, that is the weirdest thing that I've heard as an adult male, but then I reflected on it and, and as a, as a young boy, that would be a completely normal conversation to have. Hey, let's be friends. You like football. I like football. Let's be friends. As adults, we really struggle to connect with that.

And we feel like it's like, Oh, you're coming on to me. What's going on. We feel, we always read more to it than what we need to read. And so many guys are coming into our space, into the mindful man with very similar stories. Like I'm feeling so lonely. I'm like, well, have you made a friend this week? No. And so we, we strategize about ways you can do that.

For me recently, I created a surf crew and I'm starting to learn to surf this year. I'm terrible at it. I can get up on my feet, but that's about it. But I've connected with a few other guys and this guy included is in the group. And I said, Hey, I would like to be your friend. Let's create this surf crew.

And it felt weird saying it, but I'm now, I'm like, I've said it a few times. I'm feeling good about it. I can keep doing it. And, and so ways that we can connect is really important. So for the younger people, particularly that I work with, I work with in the autism space as well, is video gaming is a great way to connect.

It is a, it is a particularly online, some of the clients that I work with, they really struggle in person communicating with someone at say at school or in the workplace. And they just don't know how to make those, you know, casual conversations or even deeper conversations as well. But video gaming, because you're also doing the, the other task of playing the video game, or you've come together with a shared connection, a shared interest, whether it's, Whether it's call of duty, whether it's Minecraft, whether it's whatever game it is that they're playing.

Fortnite comes to mind for some of the other, for the other students that I work with. They're coming together with a shared purpose and so they can talk about that and openly and build these social connections, which is really positive. And one of the things I see families struggling is, is perhaps parents who haven't grown up playing video games.

And they think, they think this is such a waste of time. You're, you're wasting your day. You're playing video games. Get away from the screen. And to some extent, yes, that's true. Like I was, I grew up playing video games that I know I could easily waste 12 hours of a day just playing video games and not have a clue what's going on in the outside world.

So some elements of it can be unhealthy, but some of it can be healthy. And so the connection can be a healthy thing or the problem solving can be a healthy thing as well. And the, but it's not just video games, it's sports, it's, it's other hobbies. You know, for some of the older clients that I work with, they're involved in, in what we call men sheds over here.

So connecting with men at a shed and building furniture or fixing a car or whatever they're doing, having that shared purpose. And for me, it's the surf crew as well. And when we get coffee afterwards, having that shared thing that you can come and talk about. But then also develop those social networks is really important.

But so many boys and men struggling with this in the last couple of years. And I think COVID might've amplified it as well. We learned through COVID that we need connection, but I think we've lost, particularly after school, we've lost the ability to, to make new friends. And so we kind of stick with the old friends or we just.

Don't have friends. It's a real challenge. Yeah. Making friends. And as an, as an adult, it's hard. I mean, there's a reason why there's a million memes about it. Cause it is, it's hard. And you kind of do have to be like, Hey, you want to be friends? You do. You have to say it because otherwise people don't know what you, why, why you're talking to them.

Yeah. It's, it's really, it's an awkward conversation, but maybe we all need to develop friendship bracelets. I remember that was a big thing when we grew up, you know, walk around and see people with their friendship bracelets and maybe it's as simple as that. I don't know. Yeah, I, I don't think, I don't think you're far off.

I think that, you know, once you've, once you've passed to the age where you meet people through school, you know, you could have work friends or you can, but you don't have the bond that, you know, maybe you get from an authentic friendship. Yeah, I, I appreciate that. What are, what makes you hopeful for better mental health or better mental yeah, better mental health care?

What, what makes you hopeful? What have you seen that gives you hope? Social media has been a big thing for me in, in this space and in seeing where The hope can come from. So to give you an idea, like I didn't know anybody else who lived with OCD in my entire life. And it took when I burnt out in 2020 for my work and my study and my family, like all that stuff.

I started mindful men as an Instagram page. And the idea was that I no longer wanted to wear this mask that I had been putting on for three decades. I wanted to share my story, my true authentic self. And so I created the Instagram page. It wasn't called Michael Mann back then. It's had a few different rebranding over the, over the years, but, and it's still there.

I still, I still post every day, every, over the day. And It was this idea of me sharing with the entire world my true, authentic self and to start to be this positive male role model for other people and to give hope to other people, particularly guys that you can talk about this stuff and it's. It's not scary.

I mean, it might be scary at first, but now I've talked about it hundreds and hundreds of times. It's now second nature to me. And from there, like what I started finding other people that live with OCD or other people that live with mental health conditions and they're talking about it openly and I could see this positive.

Way that they're talking about it. It's not just like, Oh, I'm down, I'm depressed. I'm going to, you know, hurt myself or whatever you, you do see some of that stuff or, and you do see the other toxic stuff as well on social media, but you see a lot of good stuff as well. People saying, Hey, I'm Simon. And I, I I've had depression and I'm doing okay.

You can do okay to that type of stuff as well. So it was really positive. But for me, finding this community of people that live with OCD was huge because I've. I felt for the first time like what they're saying is kind of like what I've been feeling and even though I've been going to therapy for 11 years now, the therapist never really understood me because no one really specialized in OCD as well, but finding this Instagram community and that I could.

Watch what they're doing. I can like their posts and comment on their posts and then kind of start creating my own similar posts as well was really useful. And what that did is it blossomed into other things like the Mindful Men podcast, where I now connect with people across the world talking about different stories, such as this one that we're talking about today.

And I've met so many cool networks that I keep in contact with them. Like you could say I'm a professional podcast friend through, through these connections. And every now and then I'll, I'll, I'll send them a DM or I'll send them an email and say, Hey, how are you going? Or what's going on? And I've, I've built up some really good.

Friendships through that, just by putting myself out there, but then also seeing what other people are doing and connecting in with them has been really useful. So I'm really positive in this space. And, and there's a lot of guys starting to come into this space, a lot of boys and men coming into the social media space and saying, you know, this is my medication or this is my condition, or this is how I overcome this challenge.

And I see that as being real, really positive because prior to social media. I never saw that on TV or on the newspapers or magazines or whatever, or in books. I definitely didn't see it in my social circles or in my workplace as well. So I see that as, as starting to grow and, and particularly I'm really excited by the guys coming into that space and sharing their stories and.

And giving hope to people. It's, it's really enthusiastic for me. I love being in that space. And so that Instagram account now has turned into tick tock. It's into Facebook. It's on to YouTube. It's everywhere for me. Just trying to share my message with the hope that Another boy or a man sees it and goes, you know what, I don't have to bottle it up anymore.

I don't have to be this social construct that the media or my family or my, my employer or my workplace, my school or whatever, you know, tells me that I need to be, I can be my true authentic self. So that's really. That's a really exciting space is that social media, and just hope it can blossom out more into mainstream media.

We are seeing a little bit of that, as you said, with the friendship bracelets in Australia with, with sport, you know, we, we launched, we watch a lot of sport and for years it's been, if a player got injured, maybe they hurt their knee, like the older sport, the, the commentators and the news programs would talk about is when's he going to be back when they're going to be back.

You know, we're, we're, we're following the recovery journey. We're now starting to see, see players talking about having a mental health break. And saying, I'm taking four weeks out of the game. I've seen big name players in our, in our, in Aussie rules in the last couple of years, missing final series because they're taking a mental health care break, which is fantastic.

They're like to, to win a grand final is everything. It's like winning the Superbowl or whatever, or the world series. But, and so for them to do that for mental health has been, it's a real positive thing. And I just want to see more and more of that. You know, you boys and men taking that drive and saying, you know what, no matter what's going on, no matter what we're about to achieve, my mental health is more important at the moment.

And I need to take a break. I love that. And we have in our, in our U S Senate, we have a Senator from Pennsylvania who took a month off. His last name is Fetterman. I want to say his first name is Dan, but I might be wrong. And he did that. He said, I, my depression has gotten to the point where I can't manage it.

And I need time. And a lot of people had a lot of opinions about this man stepping away, but that was essentially what he was doing was saying, I, I can't function at this capacity and this is serious and I need to go someplace where I can recover. And I, I love that. I also, what I really appreciate about what you just said is.

I think in your own way, you've just kind of made a excellent case for media literacy because one of the things that social media can do well if you use it well, is that it can give you accounts and people to follow who are really uplifting or positive or helpful, or maybe challenge you in some way that's beneficial.

And it's why I advocate a lot for people to do like a social media detox where you, you go through who you follow and you say, does this benefit me? And that's, that's what you're, that's basically what you're talking about is there's so many good, good accounts out there that give you what you need.

And I'm so glad that you could find something to help you with OCD through, through social media. There's, there's one question I ask everybody at the end. So we're rounding the corner to the end. Is there anything, before I ask that, is there anything you want to add or anything you want to ask me before I carry on?

No, no, I think that that sums it up really well, is that media literacy and social media literacy, I think, can go a long way and we're getting there, it's going to be slow, it is a slow process but yeah, we are getting there and it is so powerful when we see, I'd like to see it more in movies, I'm starting to see it in movies, we talked about Die Hard and Terminator and all that type of stuff before.

I see Deadpool, I was thinking about this this morning, Deadpool is. You know, that character, he shows his vulnerabilities as much as his strengths. And I think he's doing that at the moment. He's showing the way. And I love Ryan Reynolds as well. So you know, I noticed that with Marvel, if you look at the evolution of the Thor films, it went from a character that took himself way too seriously to a guy that had a ton of insecurities.

Yes, he looks like Thor, but his insecurities are through the roof. So, yeah, it's, it's an interesting, yes, I agree, I think action movies tend to do that quite well now, as opposed to maybe when we were kids. Okay, so one thing I ask everybody is who or what do you think should be voted most popular, and this can be anything, but when I say who should be voted most popular in terms of like, you know, popularity contests, what comes to mind for you?

Ooh. I'm going to go with the guy that gave the friendship bracelets out after that conversation. That was really cool. I really, I don't know who he is, but it's such a, that's such a cool thing. And if we can do more of that type of stuff and, and particularly in the men's space, I think that those kinds of people need to be put up on pedestals and say, this is how we can do it.

It's, it's simple as. Giving out some friendship bracelets and you've given me an idea of maybe making some and selling them on my website and giving them out to my clients or something like that. It sounds like such a cool thing. So I'm going to pick that dude. Yeah. Oh, well in America, it doesn't get much better than Travis Kelsey right now.

This is like American News 101. So thank you. Thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it. Please let me know if I can ever return the favor or, you know, do anything in exchange. I'm always happy to. Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for listening.

Thank you again to my guest, Simon Rinne. You can find more episodes of Most Popular on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts. Please take time to follow, rate, and review. And if you are so inclined, and you are not one of my current students, a Patreon for Most Popular is set up and linked in the show notes.

More information, including information on mindful men. And additional resources for educators can be found on my website, adriennetrier-bieniek. com, which is also linked in the show notes. And I am on Instagram at at dr. adriennetb. Thanks again for listening. And as always, thank you, thank you, thank you to my students for the encouragement to keep making these episodes.

I'll see you next time. Bye.

​