Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
We're at war with this thing called hopelessness. 3,041 high schoolers attempt every day in this country. But it's not slowing down, Rudy. It's getting more and more difficult for young people. It's never been harder to be a young person than in the world today. And what are we doing about it? It's a clip. It's a news flash. And then we move on. You know, it's not one thing, man.
Chapter 2: How does Thomas Murphy define hopelessness among youth?
It's the feeling of hopelessness that you can't get out of. Thomas Murphy is a dynamic, purpose-driven and influential leader transforming lives through education and youth development.
As the founder of Sweethearts and Heroes, he's built a national movement dedicated to combating hopelessness and equipping people with empathy, courage and the belief that hope holds on because possibilities exist.
What is it that you're doing to help battle that?
Circle is probably the most important work that we do. And when you're in circle, you have to listen to people because you're not allowed to talk. A hundred thousand years ago, your ancestors sat in circle and one person started to talk, everybody else would lean forward and they would listen. That's the foundational root of empathy is perspective taking, listening to someone else.
We don't do a good job of that anymore. What you want to be known for? I don't want to be known, Rody. I want to create more sweethearts and heroes in our young people. They are the solution. We say our kids are the future. That's a lie. They're not the future. They're our present.
It spans the globe like a super high school internet. Today, Apple is going to reinvent the fun. It's not over until I win. The Living Your Legacy podcast for those who live to leave a legacy.
That's it.
You can live your dream.
Hello, welcome back to another episode of Legacy Makers. Sat here today with Tom and he's on a big mission, a big mission to change the lives of pretty much every person on the planet. And we're really going to dive into the epic stuff he's doing. He helps impact over a million students and 100 plus schools a year. And he's been doing that for many, many years, Spokat.
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Chapter 3: What innovative practices does Sweethearts and Heroes implement in schools?
I want you to explain it and break it down. I didn't want to take it. So go ahead and let's start there. What are we at war with?
I think it's probably better to tell you how I stumbled on this. I found myself talking to young people after a crazy little reality TV show I did. And a buddy of mine called me kind of in a panic and said, hey, Tom, I'm in trouble. I had this speaker in bullying that was supposed to be here. 900 middle schoolers. I said, can you come and do something on bullying? And I'm like, eh, I guess so.
So I came up with this silly little concept called Sweethearts and Heroes, which is a big concept. But after I did that, another school heard about it and said, hey, can you do that at our school? And it just kind of snowballed and I didn't realize what was happening.
But at the end of assemblies, I'd find myself turning the lights off, packing up my stuff, and a young person would always sneak back in the room and want to talk to me about what was going on in their life, their challenges that they were having. I started to understand that what they were feeling was a certain amount of hopelessness with what was going on in their life.
And hope for us has always been hold on, possibilities exist. They were struggling with holding on to the possibilities for their future. And this was 16 years ago. And now we know that the suicide rate with young people in middle schoolers alone have tripled since 2007. 3,041 high schoolers attempt every day in this country.
And I think the thing that hit me, the story that I was kind of alluding to initially was, as this work started to unfold, A buddy of mine, I was driving with my daughter. She just turned 16, had my ear buds in. She's 27 today.
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Chapter 4: How does social media contribute to youth mental health issues?
And my buddy sends me a video link and says, hey, man, you got to watch this right now. I said, OK, what is it? And it's a young lady named Caitlin Nicole Davis from Cedartown, Georgia. And she live streams her suicide. I remember him telling me that. And I looked over at my daughter, who was just a couple of years older. And I said to him on the phone, I said, I'll never watch that.
And he said to me, he said, Tom, we're at war. He said, we're at war with this thing called hopelessness. And I watched it, very, very difficult, very challenging to watch 45 minutes of a 12-year-old doing the unthinkable. But it's not slowing down, Rudy. It's getting more and more difficult for young people. It's never been harder to be a young person than in the world today.
And that's the war that we're in. So people think that when I say that, it sounds a little sensational. But we're losing our young people at a rate that planet Earth has never seen before. And what are we doing about it? It's a clip. It's a newsflash. And then we move on.
Yeah, so one stat stuck out at me. What was it, 3,141?
3,041 high scores attempt every day. 3,400. 3,041 high scores attempt every day.
3,041 every day. What are the main buckets that are causing that?
What a conversation that is. Malcolm Gladwell talks about this Swiss cheese effect in his great book, Outliers, talks about the holes having to line up. It's never one thing.
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Chapter 5: What role does family dynamics play in youth hopelessness?
It's not bullying. I mean, we know that there's a direct correlation between depression and suicide. But sometimes it takes a bunch of things for a young person to make that decision. You might be a kid who's sleeping on his dad's girlfriend's trailer couch, the two middle school girls that are in that trail are making life hell for you.
Your dad says to you when you're 18, you're out of here, pal. You bring a knife to school, and the school catches you and suspends you and throws you out of school. And the teachers all share emails that say, I knew this kid was going to do something like this. But behavior is a form of communication. The kid's telling us something. That kid's name was Dan. Dan took his own life.
My partner Rick has his Slipknot bracelet today. You know, it's not one thing, man. It's the feeling of hopelessness that you can't get out of.
But is that compounding a bigger picture from... Parental and family upbringing, social media now, you're saying more now than ever, is social media having a big impact on that? What's changed to increase those numbers?
That's Jonathan Haidt's new book, The Anxious Generation, tries to attempt to answer that on the social media side. I'll tell you, there's common threads that weave between all of us. And what are the two things that connect all of us? Number one, some kind of meaning, some kind of purpose, some kind of significance.
When you look at why 22 service members end their own lives every day in this country, that's one of the greatest battles that they have. You go away to war. You come back. My partner, Rick, I mean, if you look at him, he was a 25-year-old when he got blown up. 70% of his body was instantly taken from him. He was a leader. He was a soldier. Gone.
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Chapter 6: How can empathy be cultivated among young people?
What do you do if you have no ears, no nose, one leg, and your hands are melted together the next day? Now, that's an extreme example. But that common thread, it was Friedrich Nietzsche that said, he who has a why to live can bear any how. Those are some old fancy words.
But what he was trying to tell us was, if you have some kind of meaning in your life, some kind of reason, you can go through anything. You look at those kids that have single moms. She can go through anything because she's got the greatest meaning in the world, the kid. We have a generation, this is number one,
that is struggling more and more in the most technologically advanced civilization Earth has ever known, kids are saying, who am I? What's my meaning in this hyper-reality that we live in? Like, who am I? They just go from thing to thing to thing. And you ask any 15-year-old today, what do you want to do? I don't know.
Well, it's almost like you go to a buffet and there's 50 plates. It's hard to pick. Whereas 50 years ago, you got meat and potatoes every day for dinner. There's never a question of what are you going to eat tonight? Whereas you go to a buffet or go on Uber Eats, you spend an hour looking for 300 options. So I imagine that's a cascading effect in some way.
But what about, I want to ask one last question. You know, how much does, obviously the upbringing and parenting has got to be a common thread too. in this or not?
Maybe. That's a huge conversation. I talk to parents every day, but I need to take one step back because I gave you the first one. Because that feeling of meaning or significance always leads someone to a feeling of hopelessness. But the other common thread that every single person in this room shares, you and I share, every person you know, it's this feeling of human acceptance.
We're pack animals.
So the desire to have.
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Chapter 7: What are the common threads leading to youth suicide?
To have relationship. To fit in. To have relationship. I mean, you think about it, Rudy. I mean, you did some really stupid things when you were younger for one reason and one reason only. For your friends. Sure. That's it.
Yeah, yeah.
Right? Every kid wants to fit in. Every kid wants to belong. It's ancient circuitry that we have. This prestige bias, this conformity bias that we just all have. And so when a kid doesn't feel like they fit in, they belong. it always leads a young person to this feeling of hopelessness. And anyone that says, I'm not a pack animal, I'm a lone wolf, that's not true. You can't make it, man.
You isolate a human for three days, there's measurable amounts of brain damage. So if you take these two common threads that we share, this need for significance, meaning, purpose, and this deep desire we have you know, for human acceptance, it leads kids to this feeling of hopelessness. So I would say if people say to me, like, what are the common threads?
There's a whole bunch of other things that young people, that kid Dan, and I can give you a thousand other stories of other struggles, but those are the two big ones.
Okay, I love that. So yeah, that's a good way to kind of condense it there. I understand there's so many variables. So let's transition now, right? These are the two big variables or link backs. What is it that you're doing to help battle that?
Sure. Well, you know, when you look at a young person who's struggling, the one thing that they're struggling with is that hopelessness. So they need hope. And if you think every time you struggled in life, someone came into your life and gave you that hope that they were carrying with them. And we believe, we know that every single person has that hope inside of them.
If my partner Rick was here right now, he'd tell you the most beautiful story. You know, he was, I'll give you the very short condensed version of this one because it's a showstopper. He gets out of the hospital a year into recovery. He looks like a monster. Every kid's running from him, literally in public.
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Chapter 8: What is the legacy Thomas Murphy aims to leave behind?
He goes to this restaurant with his brother in San Antonio where he was doing his recovery for three years. Sits down at a table. Little girl across the room with her grandpa. And grandpa says, go say hi to him. Go say hi to him. Grandpa forces her. She gets about halfway over, looks at Rick, and he says, hi, how you doing? She turns around, right back to her grandpa. That's going to be his life.
No kid's ever going to accept him. She gets back to her grandpa, and she looks at him, and she says, grandpa, he's really nice. Changed everything. That little girl didn't know she had hope inside of her. I got chills thinking about that. And I've heard that a thousand times. That little girl had no idea she had that hope inside of her that she could give to him.
She took this big bucket of hope, she dumped it all over him, changed his life forever. At that moment, he knew he could be accepted. There was hope, the possibility that things would change for him. Same thing happened to you on a different level. We all get blown up on the inside at some point in our life.
But every time you were struggling, someone came into your life and they gave you that hope that you needed. And that's the original definition of this bully, this 16th century bully. When the word was invented in the beginning of the 16th century, it meant sweetheart. It was a very endearing term. But that person wasn't easy on you. They said, Rudy, get your crap, get in the car.
You picked this sport. You're not quitting. Get that instrument out of its case. Start practicing. You remember that person in your life? Or when you didn't feel like getting out of bed one day, they called you up and said, Rudy, I'm coming over. Get your stuff on. We're going out. They gave you hope when you needed it the most.
So let me ask you a flip question. If that's been around for centuries, I feel that happens the least amount it's ever happened. Yeah. Because they don't want to apply pressure these days. So in an inverted sense, is that causing a lot of these problems?
Sure, man. That's a big discussion around resiliency and the lack of resiliency that kids have.
This coddling of the American mind that Jonathan Haidt... Well, I don't even see it in staff and people I work with these days. You know, I... I didn't serve in the military and all that, but I have a lot of respect for people that do. And I remind people, you know, we in our business use, you know, a lot of kind of quotes and reflection on like Navy SEALs and the training and stuff.
And I always try and remind people when they're upset or they think life's hard or, you know, these sort of stories about your partner, right? Yeah. I mean, it can sometimes give context that life's not really that hard in comparison for some other people.
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