SPEAKER_04: 0:02

To even question what you've been told is true is incredibly courageous. It doesn't always feel like courage, what looks like courage to other people. For me, it feels like survival. This is our personal benefit.

SPEAKER_01: 0:15

If I'm surrounded by thinkers, by lovers, by passion, by integrity, then I really do think that I know who I am.

SPEAKER_00: 0:21

There's a piece that is indescribable when you're being who you are and you're living your purpose. I'm not gonna come to the end of my life and be like I didn't live the life I was meant to live.

SPEAKER_03: 0:30

Can I be so comfortable in the unknown and so comfortable in that uncertainty that every version of it is going to be okay?

SPEAKER_06: 0:38

This is the Inner Rebel Podcast.

SPEAKER_03: 0:50

Oh my gosh, I am so excited. Hi Melissa.

SPEAKER_06: 0:53

Hi, Jessica.

SPEAKER_03: 0:54

I think it's possible I started a podcast just so I can pull all my favorite people out of their busy lives and make them talk to me.

SPEAKER_06: 1:04

It does feel like one of the best parts about it that we get to have these really fun conversations with people we love.

SPEAKER_03: 1:10

Yeah. Antonio Ayon is here with us today. Antonio, I have known you for a while. I count you among my dearest friends, even though sometimes we only get to talk like once a year. So it felt kind of weird to research you. You know what I mean? But I have to say that your Google search is impressive. And I am so proud of you. Not just because of all the things you've accomplished. I'm proud of the human that you are, and also because I know what it's taken you to get to this point. So I really want to just dive into this conversation. But for our listeners, I'm gonna give you a little bio.

SPEAKER_07: 1:49

Okay.

SPEAKER_03: 1:50

Antonio Cayon is an actor, restaurateur, podcast host, husband, father, and activist. He has a passionate fan following for his appearances in many a Hallmark movie. You may have recently seen him in Disney's Under Wraps 2, which honestly I know is just a funny mommy movie for kids, but you are so good in it. You're so good in it. And there's a trend in the roles that you get to play that I'd like to touch on in our conversation today. But you're also a restaurateur, you're a partner and operations manager of three amazing restaurants in Vancouver, BC. You co-host the podcast Falling for Basketball. You are a husband and father of two amazing kids. You are one of the few people I see who leverages every role you play in your life, not just as an actor, but in all the realms you show up in to make a difference in this world. And you're one of my all-time favorite people to talk to. Thank you. Do you remember in the simpler days? I think it was back in 2015 when we were both in Vancouver, how we had so little to do with our lives. We could just eat multiple main dishes in restaurants and talk for hours.

SPEAKER_01: 3:04

Those were some of my favorite days.

SPEAKER_03: 3:07

Yeah. Yeah, me too. And now look at all the things that you do. Yeah. So you've got to be a whole lot of busy, but I bring that up because I've watched you radically transform your life over the last seven years. So I have so many questions for you when basically exploding, and you can pretty much only give us one-word answers because otherwise I'll never be able to fit them all in.

SPEAKER_06: 3:27

We help each other with the people we know. And she's like, I have way too many questions for him. Yeah, I'm only half joking. One-word answers. Yeah. You might have to be a repeat guest.

SPEAKER_01: 3:37

So we so just questions.

SPEAKER_03: 3:40

Welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01: 3:40

We are so happy to have you. Thank you. I'm very excited to be here.

SPEAKER_03: 3:44

We're gonna just dive deep right off the top. Let's do it. You can answer this any way that you want. But who are you? And how is that different from who you were told you were supposed to be?

SPEAKER_01: 3:56

Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. Who am I? I'm not gonna lie. I think I asked that question more than any other question that I ask myself. And I I think I come up with a different answer every like five to fifteen minutes. I'm not even kidding. I was just years, but minutes. Not even it's it is it is happening very fast in real time. I just dropped my guys off at daycare and I was listening to my audiobook Du jour, because I read with my ears these days in the car, and I was reading all about, or I was ear reading all about the ego and bending narrative to sort of suit what it is that we need. And I had to pull over for a second because I had to ask myself how often I'm doing that. It weighs pretty heavily on me to just think about the ways in which I might be bending the narrative to retell my own stories and what it's serving. And sometimes I think it's serving a good thing, and maybe sometimes it's serving a bad thing. I guess I hadn't thought about that, which is why I had to pull over because it it I felt very distracted.

SPEAKER_06: 4:55

This is too deep to drive.

SPEAKER_01: 4:57

Yeah, this happens to me a lot. I need a driver, not because I'm special, but because I can't think and drive at the same time. And I find driving so boring that I'm always thinking. But to not veer too far off. I don't know that I have like a chalk a block answer to the who am I question. I have a tendency to view who I am through the lens of the people that I'm around. And I, for better or worse, if I'm surrounded by thinkers, by lovers, by passion, by integrity, then I really do think that I know who I am. There are other realms in my life where I'm not surrounded by those people. And I think that much like other people, I have a tendency sometimes to spiral down towards the basest rather than to rise to the highest. We want to say cream rises to the top, but if the jug is low on milk, the top's pretty low. But I think I have chosen in the past five years to really define myself as a father and to center my being around my two boys because I think that it connects me to my values the quickest. That's that's my version of that answer.

SPEAKER_06: 6:00

That's a great answer. What's the part two of that? Who did you think you were supposed to be?

SPEAKER_01: 6:05

Again, I have so many answers to that question. I think the biggest one is the one that I've always told myself. And frankly, I hope this doesn't come across as like a weird narcissistic statement, but I think it's the truest. I think that the person that I was brought here to be is a person that can make something out of nothing and create change in meaningful ways. As I say it, I'm welling up with tears. It's something that I actually quite deeply believe, and I feel at my most lost when I'm not in touch with that.

SPEAKER_03: 6:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 6:31

That's the person that I believe that I'm meant to be. I've had innumerable stories given to me by the world around me that again, I have a hard time figuring out whether I'm bending the narrative to create an obstacle for myself to feed my ego, so that if I don't achieve something, I can point to the reasons why I haven't achieved it rather than taking action. I'm just being honest. I'm pretty sure I do that every five to fifteen minutes again. But I do. I have stories of who I was meant to be, and they're not full of greatness. They're full of I don't know what the opposite of greatness is, like the low-end parts of life. And I fight every day to remind myself that they're not true. And that maybe neither of them are true.

SPEAKER_06: 7:16

You said kind of like your fight for greatness is that inner rebel inside of you, that one that knows the other option, that could choose to believe that, maybe shifting his mind every five to 15 minutes about it.

SPEAKER_05: 7:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: 7:29

And it really resonated with me because there are a lot of very real reasons you could have chosen not to rise up, not to find that higher self, not to surround yourself by those people that bring that part out in you. And you've chosen a different path, or at least a majority of the time, right?

SPEAKER_01: 7:44

I try to, yeah. I think working to choose that other path is more fair than chosen. Because, you know, if I'm being honest with you, today I woke up today and I was just having a down day. And I can't really contextualize it. Nothing's different, nothing's wrong. But there are just mornings where you wake up reflecting on things and you think I'm not there, or I'm not here, or I'm not somewhere. I sometimes have a hard time geolocating myself in my own life. One of the things that I always used to say, I guess I still say it to my therapist, is the biggest regret that I'll ever have is that I couldn't live a million lives to understand this one. Or that I couldn't have at least a memory of the million lives that I may or may not have lived so that I can understand this one. Because I just think context matters. And there are so many times where I'm I'm like and Jess, we've talked about this, where I get stuck in what I think is a fear-based mentality. I'm just worried or afraid of I don't know, something. It's not a ghost, it's not an alien, but it's but it's there's some little kernel inside of me that that will back off sometimes for fear of whatever it is, fear of finance, fear of repercussions, fear of et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I don't know, fill in whatever blanks, and I bet you I can make them all true. And so those are the moments where I think I shy away from my inner rebel and put it off to one side and say, like, this might be part of the inherited beliefs. You have to be pragmatic, you have to have the things in place that society and et cetera, et cetera, but I also don't believe that. And so it's a it's quite a struggle.

SPEAKER_03: 9:14

Can you take us back in time then and speak to us a little bit about the environment that you grew up in and what were the beliefs or values or maybe significant events that shaped that worldview or or your worldview and your sense of self at that time?

SPEAKER_01: 9:30

Yeah. I'm not sure how much of it comes from my home. And that's not to say that it didn't. It's literally to say I'm not sure how much of it came from my home. My father is uh was originally from Trinidad. He was what people would colloquial say a jack of all trades and master of none. He was a person who did many, many things. And I don't know. Uh I think that I I have a different outlook now, which I would like to share, but I think at the time I was led to believe that my dad was somebody who kind of like wandered from one thing to another and maybe wasn't achieving. And I don't think that's true. And I can say that now because I feel what that journey is like, and I think that the outward perception of success and the inward understanding of intention are two very, very, very different things. And so I can look back on what I understood as a kid, reframe it for myself more so than rewrite it, to say, I think this was a man who also was very passionate and believed in the people around him and believed in affecting change and sort of fought for that. And so that was one of my models up to a point. My father passed when I was 19, he was sick from the time I was like 11 or 12. But a lot of the limiting narratives and limiting beliefs that I think I have about myself didn't grow out of my home in a conventional sense. I didn't have parents who said you can't, you can't, you shouldn't, you won't. But I did have pretty pragmatic parents. When I first got into acting, I scored a weird job hosting a TV show. And like my parents let me do it for a year for some reason while I was in elementary school. And at the end of that year, my dad said, Okay, that's enough. You have to go and get your education. That's more important. And at the time, I also played soccer, and I was fine. In my mind, I was good, but like I wasn't that good. And yet my dad was fine with me pursuing sports. At the time I didn't get it, and I was pretty upset, and it took me years. I was so mad because in grade seven I could see that this was something I wanted to do, and I wasn't allowed back in until I was almost like 17, 18, or 19.

SPEAKER_03: 11:29

Do you mean acting?

SPEAKER_01: 11:30

Acting, yeah. Yeah, or or just the just whatever the show biz was. I was hosting at the time, but I just knew that there was something there for me and that I was excited about it, but it wasn't supported.

SPEAKER_03: 11:41

What do you think made him support sports, which is not a conventional?

SPEAKER_01: 11:45

I don't think he did support sports.

SPEAKER_03: 11:47

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 11:47

What I realized happened was that he himself was an artist. And in his time period, he was like, Yeah, he was from Trinidad. One of his best friends that he grew up with ended up being a Nobel poet laureate. He went on to go start the black theater workshop in Montreal, which still exists, it was the first black theater that existed. He was one of the founding members of a Caravana Festival, which is the biggest Caribbean festival in North America. Like he did massive things. But at that time in the world, as a black man who had come to a country that he wasn't necessarily invited into any conversations, you didn't make the entire pie your passion. It was a slice of the pie. And so what he passed down to me as a limiting belief was you don't make this the entire pie. And in fact, I ended up meeting a friend of his years later in Montreal, and he almost used those exact words when he explains it to me. Like he laughed at me when I told him that I was an actor and that my wife was a dancer choreography. And I mean like belly laughed. Like he didn't chuckle. He laughed like I told him a joke. And and but he also was very impressed. And he said, in many ways, you are your father's wildest dreams. This is what we all wanted for you. It's just that it wasn't possible for us, or if it was possible for them, they didn't know it. Nobody opened a door for them. And frankly, nobody opened that door for me. It took my father passing and me hustling and figuring it out. And still, I do ten things all at the same time. So I think as far as that aspect of it goes, that's where those beliefs did come from. But I had very encouraging parents. But also I grew up in a household that was very adept at the conversation of race relations, which I think was a double-edged sword in some ways. I learned how to navigate the world. I learned a lot about how the world might see me and see my peers and what the scales of justice and equity look like, which I think is extremely important and potentially life-saving if I'm being very honest in in some ways, but I also think it creates another limiting belief because all of a sudden you have a poverty narrative or you have a class narrative. You have something that if your ego is searching for something to hang on to, there it is. You get it for free. Yeah. Yeah. I would I would say the biggest limiting belief or fear, I'll call it a limiting belief. That language sort of makes it make sense in my head when I say it out loud, is that I owe an aspect of myself to other people for them to grant me what allows me to stay afloat.

SPEAKER_03: 14:24

Ooh. Does that make sense? It does. Can you repeat it?

SPEAKER_01: 14:28

I owe an aspect of myself to other people so that they can grant me what I need to stay afloat. So for example, like an employer, uh, right? So I need to remain gainfully employed. I make enough money to subsist, to take care of my family, to make sure that I'm raising my boys in a version of the world I want. But it's not the best version I could have. It's the version that has been given to me by somebody else who holds the power. And in order to maintain that, because my fear is losing that, in order to maintain that, I have to show up in a way that suits their story, not mine.

SPEAKER_03: 15:04

Is it like a fear of losing safety and security? Do you think that's the primary, like the root of it?

SPEAKER_01: 15:12

Yeah, it might be. Or the other side of that mountain, if you climbed up and looked down, it is simply not knowing how the ball's gonna roll downhill and and thinking it's gonna get stuck. I I don't know if that metaphor makes sense, but I'm on one side of the mountain and I know that the sun's on the other side, but I'm pretty high on the mountain. And so the idea of going to the other side and dropping down and discovering that I was wrong and lost everything in those days where we would bike around, walk around, drive around, and go eat all the time, I was un I was untethered. I often look back at my life in my 20s and early 30s, and I feel in some ways like I was unstoppable. If you told me no, A, hold my beer, I'll I'll I'll teach you how.

SPEAKER_06: 16:00

We would be good friends.

SPEAKER_01: 16:02

Yeah, like that that that was the world. Because one of the things that I really made sense of was if someone's telling me no, what they're really telling me is that they don't know how, and that's okay. Not everybody is able to body forth material from an imagination. I get it, sure, not everyone can do that, but I can do it. I know that I can do it, I've done it before. And yet, as far as a limiting belief goes, a lot of the people who are unable to do that and who are the no people feel like they're holding a lot of the cards that I think I need in order to move forward or to move up or to move, to move. I don't know. And so as an actor, that means casting and producers and networks. As a family guy, that means where I get my salary from. It's not true. I actually don't believe it's true, but boy, does it have a hold. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: 16:46

But your body does. It's like your brain can say that my brain knows it's not true, but my body feels a different story, right? Because my body has been conditioned to believe otherwise, and the other holds the power, and I can't trust it, right? And I think it's really interesting the way in which you've been such a boundary pusher in your life and the way in which you've developed your restaurants and the way in which you've pivoted during COVID, and the way in which you've been a pioneer as an actor, you do know that you have the power because you're pushing that all the time. So I think it's interesting that the number one limiting belief you mentioned is also kind of your superpower.

SPEAKER_01: 17:24

Absolutely. There's an intense irony to it.

SPEAKER_03: 17:26

I think you can hold two beliefs at the same time. Yeah. That's what this is showing, right? We all have this duality where you have access to that truth all the time, whether it's conscious or unconscious. And then that truth is bumping up against all of these beliefs that we've been raised to just accept about the world that we live in.

SPEAKER_07: 17:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 17:48

And it's hard to decipher between those two things that are literally happening at the same time.

SPEAKER_01: 17:53

One of the pieces of it for me, and this is where other people factor in. And I think who was it, Sartre, who's like, hell is other people? This is where that shows up for me. This is a maybe an odd way to explain this about myself, but I've always felt like a time traveler in a strange way. And I don't mean that literally. I'm not actually interstellar getting in a ship and going, but I feel like a time traveler in a strange way, it would be amazing.

SPEAKER_07: 18:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 18:15

But I've always felt like I have the ability to get quiet, get centered, get connected to myself, and then just go into the future and make sense of how something is going to function and bring it back to today. And the thing that I run into the most and have.

SPEAKER_06: 18:30

And I think just as exploding from a human design perspective. She literally is like about to jump through.

SPEAKER_05: 18:35

She's like, it's in your chart, it's in your chart.

SPEAKER_01: 18:37

It is, it is, it is.

SPEAKER_05: 18:39

And and and I know, like I'm like losing my shit over here.

unknown: 18:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05: 18:45

You're like dumb.

SPEAKER_01: 18:46

That's how I've always felt. I felt like I can't even say I felt like I know when I'm doing it, and I bring it back and I say, This is what we need to do, and here's why. And I can't really explain it. And the problem that I run into time and time again is like a lack of invitation, is the person on the other end, the receiver goes, No, no, thanks. No, thanks. And then six months later, does the thing that I pitched.

SPEAKER_03: 19:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 19:11

Like clockwork. Clockwork. Yeah. Like to the point that like it's the most frequent conversation that my wife and I have where I come home and she's like, What are you mad about? And I'm like, Do you remember? And I tell her, and she's like, Yeah. And I was like, Well, we're doing it. And she's like, That was from last August. I'm like, I know. Or remember that thing that I said was gonna happen if we didn't X, Y, Z, and that, yeah. Yeah, it just happened.

SPEAKER_03: 19:34

So, what do you want to talk about here? Can we talk about your human design? Are we allowed to?

SPEAKER_01: 19:39

100%.

SPEAKER_03: 19:40

Okay, so one piece that you just brought up is you're a projector, and the projector needs to wait for the invitation. So there is this innate knowing that you need to be seen and received and recognized in order to be heard. But this other part of your chart that you already touched on your life mission is the cross of the unexpected. And it literally is like well, it is being a visionary and having a hand in the future, being an agent of progress, seeing the trends of the future. You're here to bring these new ideas into the world. Yeah. But sometimes you see them before the world is actually ready for them. And I think that's the frustration you're bumping up against is you see it so clearly.

SPEAKER_01: 20:19

Yeah. I've never known how to make sense of that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 20:22

And until the world is caught up, it can be hard to actually implement.

SPEAKER_01: 20:27

Yeah. And we're not even talking big things half the time. Like I'm not pitching new political ideological landscapes to fix things, although give me an opportunity, and I would love to. But they're often pretty benign things. But it's true, the people that I'm in conversation with sometimes are not welcome to it.

SPEAKER_06: 20:48

You need to be surrounded by manifesting generators. Like you tell me an idea, I'll be like, let's go, Antonio. Let's go, let's run. I'm always trying to get Jessica to run. And she's like, oh, a call down over there. So then you just need new man, you need manifesting generator friends, and then you can get your invitations on the spot. Johnny on the spot.

SPEAKER_05: 21:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 21:06

I'm realizing that I was one of those people who resisted the truth about the future, about me that you presented to me four years ago. And I was sharing that with Melissa before we started, that you were the person. And I even wrote it down, I have text messages still.

SPEAKER_01: 21:22

I remember though.

SPEAKER_03: 21:24

I was interested in human design at the time, but I really was like, I'm just gonna be an actor. It never crossed my mind that it would ever become anything. And you sent me a message saying that you thought I should be doing some kind of life coaching, maybe, and incorporating human design into that. And my response to you was that I don't know how I could improve other people's lives until I felt I had been fully realized in my own. And you said, I have it written down. You said, maybe you learning how to guide others illuminates how to guide your own. And you have a developed way of asking questions that leads others to discoveries, like you guiding others as part of you living your best life. And at the time I felt you speaking into a deep truth about me and resisted it so completely. I remember going, oh yeah, I'll think about that. Like total fear, just total fear at the thought. I never actually ended up pursuing that in any kind of direct way. It just ended up happening to me.

SPEAKER_07: 22:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 22:30

Like two years later. And you said it, you knew it. And I resisted it. I was like, I'm not ready. And I think sometimes the world isn't always ready. Yeah. But when they are, your impact is so enormous. And I wanted to come back to like the roles that you play because it shows up there too. It shows up in how you approach a restaurant. You were one of the first BIPOC men to lead a Hallmark movie. In Underwraps 2, it's the first same-sex wedding. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_01: 23:04

First Disney Channel original movie that has a same-sex wedding.

SPEAKER_03: 23:08

Which is wild.

SPEAKER_01: 23:09

Which is wild.

SPEAKER_03: 23:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 23:11

It's so cool.

SPEAKER_03: 23:12

Even the roles that come to you are game-changing roles that have something to do with taking us into this new future. And it's not like you get to, I mean, I'm an actor too, so I know you don't always get to call the shots on what roles you get.

SPEAKER_01: 23:26

You don't choose.

SPEAKER_03: 23:27

And yet it keeps happening to you that you're on the forefront of change in everything that you do.

SPEAKER_01: 23:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 23:32

And I saw how you approached the restaurants during the pandemic. I'd love you to talk about that too, about the staff meals and how you just saw this opportunity to be of service and pivoted everything, like in an instant. Can you just speak to what that was?

SPEAKER_01: 23:47

Yeah. Yeah, we did it overnight. I pay attention to world news, obviously. And I had a friend who was living in Italy at the time, so I knew what was coming. And we would have conversations about it where they would say we have to be prepared to close. Like the doors are closing, the world is about to change. And literally, like up until the night before they were arguing with me that I was just being, I don't know, fear-mongering. Sorry, I'm gonna get off topic for a half second. The best thing that happened to me in the past probably 10 years is the word gaslighting. I know that sounds odd. I know it sounds odd. I know, I know, I know that it sounds odd, but I've never had a word for the thing that I felt was happening to me, but I felt like I was crazy. I felt like I was losing my mind because I was saying something that seemed so obvious, but I was saying it in January, and we closed in March. So I had a bit of a runway to think about who we were and who I was, and certainly my role within the company is not the same as everybody else's role within the company and the person that I am. I'm a person that wants to think about other people. I'm in hospitality because I believe in a greater idea, not because I believe in luxury food. I understand that we're a business, we have to make money, all that stuff, rah-rah, rah, great. We gotta get on lists in Michelin and cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. But at the end of the day, for me, the question that I started asking is if we truly believe in being hospitable, what does it mean to be hospitable when the four walls disappear? Right? Like if a building is literally just a physical construct and while we are within it, we can say we're hospitable. If those walls dissolve, are we still able to make that state? And I was lucky enough when I was in theater school to have uh R. H. Thompson introduced this idea to us when we were in our fourth year about going out and making theater, and it changed my life. He said, if you want to know if you're any good at making art, don't do it in a big city. Don't go to Summerstock Theater. Go to the middle of a rural town in a field where they've never seen theater and put on a play. And you will discover who you are and what you are and how to connect with people. Because if you can make community out of nothing, that's when you know that you understand what the craft is. And really, that sentence changed everything about the way I thought about what we did because it made it so that I could untether from all of the institutions, I could untether from all of the things that I was told it has to be, has to be, has to be this way. That deep down inside I was like, I don't buy that, but I had nothing to point to, and this guy gave me something to point to. So with the staff meal thing, we sat around the morning that we closed our doors, and I said, We have a lot of talented people on staff, and we have kitchens full of food that's gonna go bad, and we have people that are scared and they have nowhere to go and they're not sure where their meal's gonna come from. Why don't we just make sure that we can cook for for our own? We don't know how long this is gonna be. Why don't we just cook until we're out of food and we'll just do staff meal? And my partner, he like he saw that idea and was like, yeah, that's great. And I said, you know, if we're gonna do that, why don't we just start doing five dollar meals for anybody in the restaurant community as well. So if you're on our staff, you can show up and you get it for free. If you're at a neighboring restaurant, you can come in and for five bucks you can get mac and cheese and whatever the things are we were gonna make. And he said, Well, if we're gonna do that for them, why don't we just do that for everybody? I I did not think that he would take the ball and run with it because I was pretty used to getting those. I hadn't pitched the bigger idea that I had. I started small and I was pretty happy to have somebody go like, yeah, if we're gonna go big, let's go big. And so we just started to scale it. I built a website overnight that did e-commerce. I taught myself how it worked, and we signed up with Shopify. Uh, we put together simple little recipes, and the next morning we were cooking, and the next morning we were selling. Then from there, I basically just started calling other restaurants, restaurateurs that I knew, and I would say, Are your lights on? And they would say no. I'd say, Do you want to turn them on? And they would come over and we'd sit in the parking lot socially distanced, and I would explain to them exactly what the model was. And I would say, here's what you're gonna do, here's how it's gonna work, here's how the cash flow operates, here's what's gonna come in, here's what's gonna go out. And at the end of it, you're gonna find your own path in this. But what I was acutely aware of was like, this was gonna put wind in our sails, and other people's pilot lights were about to be extinguished, and if I could just light their pilot light, they could figure out how to stoke the flame. And all of them did. They took the model and they transformed it to work for them. One guy turned it into a grocery store, one person turned it into a bottle shop for high-end wine, one person turned it into a hot sauce selling company, and she's still selling hot sauce now. But uh I didn't do any of that, I just taught them how to keep the light on. And I mean, of all the things I get to take with me when I leave, I hope the memory of that feeling is what I get, because that's what it was about was figuring out how to build community in places that there wasn't any and that we direly needed it. Everyone was so scared, and no one knew what they needed. And for me, uh I felt like it was really simple. All you needed was to have someone help you tend to your garden. That was it. Like I just needed someone to look in my backyard and help me fill it up. And if if my backyard was full, then I can look in yours and help you, and you can look in yours and help you, and so on and so forth. And it is, it's what happened. And it got us through a pretty tough time, and we came out on the other side of it with an extra restaurant.

SPEAKER_06: 29:18

There's so much genius in what you've done. I would call you, I don't know where this term came from originally, but a vision holder, one who can see. And even the phrase that you just said, I'm the one that lights your pilot light. You get to stoke the flame. Not every vision you have is going to be a home run immediately. Like all the times you're like, I've been being gas lit. It's like the gift and the curse of being a vision holder. I have some of that in myself too. And I loved, and this is something I talk about ton blue in the face that we have these walls, and these walls we make mean something. But if the walls go away, what's the bigger intention underneath what we're doing here? What's our value? And if we have that as the foundation. It doesn't have to look like walls, right? That's the beauty of being not attached to a certain path. And people who are not attached can be really freaking effective because you're like, okay, we got to pivot. Let's pivot, right? We don't have the walls. How are we going to get there? But here's our intention and here's our value. My brain was like, this is just exploding in a way that I wanted to reflect all of that back because it's just, it's masterful for a vision holder to pivot like that, to build a foundation, to stoke the fire, to so much in that is brilliant.

SPEAKER_01: 30:30

That statement that you made about intention and vision, I don't know if this resonates visually, but somebody once pitched me this idea that a vision is something you have on the wall in front of you and you walk towards. And I've never understood that. It didn't make sense to me. And then I was talking with this woman who like I really only knew for about three weeks, and she taught me so much. And I said this to her. I said, you know, I'm in the middle of building policy and values for our company, and I'm trying to sell it to my peers and whatever. But this idea of holding values up in front of us and saying we all aspire to that doesn't make sense to me. And she said, No, you you she's like, it it's backwards. Who taught you that? That's not right. And she said, the values are behind you. The vision is behind you. And you can walk confidently forward knowing that that's your foundation. If you don't have the values behind you or underneath you, if they're not the firmament of what you're doing, then they're not your values, they're just aspirations. And you can aspire to whatever you want. But if you're going to aspire to be a good person, you might as well also aspire to be an astronaut. Like you either are or you aren't. And so you have to do the work to embed this deep in your garden, and then it can grow as high as it wants.

SPEAKER_06: 31:38

I feel like my entire face got so warm. Like I just noticed physical sensations when like people say things. Like sometimes my right leg gets goosebumps, and sometimes I was like, oh my God, my whole head is warm. Like that is so resonating with me. Things I say out loud.

SPEAKER_03: 31:54

What you shared is a great example of holding two beliefs at the same time, where you see a vision and you have to sort of navigate those relationships that are the gatekeepers to your security.

SPEAKER_07: 32:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 32:07

So I'm curious if we could get inside of you and how you actually work through those moments of fear where you're like bumping up against, or when your values bump up against the world. And how you've learned to build a relationship to self-trust.

SPEAKER_01: 32:26

I haven't. I I truly, truly haven't. I will tell you this. How do I say this without sounding? I don't care. I'm reckless. I'm reckless. And I don't mean that like I'm not thoughtful, I don't think things through, I'm impulsive. It's not that. I'm reckless insofar as if it makes sense to me, if inside me it makes sense, like physically, emotionally, energetically, then it's true. But there's no gray area for me. It is just true. And so when I say that I'm reckless, I put myself in the path of getting like beaten down on a regular basis because I don't understand that it's not true to everybody. And I I know that sounds odd, but when something is so clear to me, I get frustrated because I assume that it's clear to everybody. And that's I mean, that's a foolish thing to think. But I really do think it. I'm telling you this with all honesty. And it's something that again, like my wife had to clarify for me. She was like, you sometimes have the capacity to hold really big ideas with intricate moving parts that make sense to you. And when you pitch them to people, they say no to you because they don't understand all the parts, and the parts that they do know are implausible or impossible or they don't add up.

SPEAKER_03: 33:54

Has this always been inside of you? Like, because this takes courage.

SPEAKER_01: 33:57

Yeah, but it doesn't. This is this is what I mean.

SPEAKER_03: 34:00

It sounds like this is something that's just innate, that's been with you your whole life.

SPEAKER_01: 34:04

I'm gonna say it in the most outlandish way, but I'm so stupid when it comes to this that I just walk in the door and I'm like, la, and then I get all the no's, and I can't figure out why I'm getting the no's, and then I get angry, and then I get frustrated, and then then all of the bad stuff starts to happen. Then I start to spiral in on myself, and then I start to create walls and distance myself from people and all of the like very human, ego-based reactions. You ask a three-year-old who's just learning language a question, they just tell you the truth. They just tell you their observational truth. And so it doesn't take courage for a kid to tell you that they don't like your shirt. You know what I mean? And so that feeling inside of me is the same. I just think that the thing I'm saying makes sense until uh I have someone look at me with a quizzical look or a judgmental look or a dismissive look, and then it hurts my feelings. And then I retract.

unknown: 35:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 35:03

Does that kind of make sense? And so my relationship with self-trust is I can't even call it a relationship with self-trust. I feel as though my read on the world is always right. It's not always right. I'm wrong a lot, but I don't know that.

SPEAKER_06: 35:17

But that's trust, though. I just so passionately believe in myself and my ideas that I'm blindsided when other people can't see it. And it's interesting that it occurs to you as reckless. I guess this is the point of our podcast. It's reckless to believe so deeply in my own ideas and the way I see the world or how I feel like I could move forward. And it's maybe unconventional, so it's not met with massive agreement.

SPEAKER_01: 35:45

Yeah. And the reason it feels reckless is that there's a social structure in place that you have to be willing to disregard in order to get out there and do it. And so that's the part that's reckless. I know the social construct. Listen, I've been in situations where I've talked back to police and gotten away with it because I was right. Because I was right. I knew that I was right, and yet objectively looking back on it, that wasn't the right thing to do. There was a danger.

SPEAKER_03: 36:15

If we don't want to call it courage, we cannot call it courage, but maybe it's just maybe it is stupidity. But I think that there is a courage to experiencing this much pushback or being in enough situations where you're like, oh, like this isn't the way the world sees things, and you're just gonna be who you are anyway.

SPEAKER_01: 36:35

If I'm gonna nitpick the language of it, the only reason it's not courage for me is that it's not a conscious reuppance the next time. So I can pitch you an idea today and get crushed, and that idea I'm probably not bringing back. I don't always have the courage to bring that idea back. But tomorrow with a new idea, it's a new day, and what I had yesterday isn't what I have today. And so I'm not overcoming something. There's almost like a naivete to it. I'm like, oh, I can tell you about this thing without the memory almost that yesterday I did this exact thing with you and you were upset about it. There's a very waiting for Godot quality of it where every day the hopefulness is that Godot is going to show up. And also the fact that I always think I'm right, which which I know that every time I say it is absurd, but the fact that I always think I'm right often means that I think the other person's wrong. And I will argue something, and you you know this. I will argue something until we've ground it to a pulp, but not because it's me versus the other person, but I feel like there's an idea between the two of us that I just can't get the right angle on. And so if there's more to it, I need to keep attacking it until I find this like little speck, and I'm like, oh, that was a perspective that I needed in order to shift this. Got it. And then I shift perspective, and then I'm kind of still right about it because I'm learning.

SPEAKER_03: 37:56

A quote that I read off your website, which basically speaks to the exact spirit of this show. You wrote, I like to explore the parts of the human condition that force us to be brave, to be strong, to be resilient, to dream. And that is truly the essence of what we're here to talk about. Yeah. Can you speak to that? Like what is it? Because you wrote that on your website as an actor. So what is it that pulls you towards that exploration in your creative work, even though I think it extends far beyond your work as an actor? It's part of everything that you you do.

SPEAKER_01: 38:29

It is part of everything. Yeah, I think you're you're you're bang on. I set those as very clear intentions for myself. And I set intentions kind of all the time because I feel like they are the things that help propel me forward and help me discuss with the universe what it is that I want, the things that I'm like aspiring to. And those things that are on the website aren't about me as an actor necessarily, but they are about me as an artist. And when I say artist, I don't mean actor and I don't mean writer, I mean liver, the art of being alive. It extends far past anything that we can transform into something tangible. There's probably more words I could have put there, but those four words are the places where when something touches I can feel it. Like the moments that I have to be brave in my life, my body has a physiological response. And something about that response tells me that it's important that it matters. You know, like if I think about under wraps, when we got to stand up there and shoot the wedding scene, me and my fellow actor Claude, Claude is in his late 50s. He's a gay man who has been in this industry for a long time, and he's never had the opportunity to be seen in that way. And we stood up there and we said vows to each other, and both of us were just like crying our little faces off. Not because it was touching, not because it was beautiful, because it was difficult. Because it felt as though we were pushing against years of storytelling that said, This doesn't belong, you don't belong, there is no space for this, this is not your outlet. That feeling of needing to be resilient in that scene in that moment was the cameras rolling. Are we gonna short circuit the cameras by professing our love as two men and actually like tenderly touching each other? Like, what's gonna happen? Those are the pieces of the human condition that I guess they make me feel the most alive and oftentimes the most vulnerable in all of those little windows or pockets. I'm worried that everything is going to fall apart because the stories that have been told not necessarily by anyone, but through television, through film, through music, through the education system, through the political systems, if anything outside of our prescribed narrative happens, the sky will fall, the earth will open up and swallow you whole. Intellectually we know it's not true, and in our bodies we know it's not true, but it doesn't make it any less scary. It's been designed to be scary. And I think it allows us to rise and start to move towards this idea of unity and being able to see each other as all part of the same ecosystem, the same organism. Like we're much more alike than we are different. And all of those words on the website, those words that I chase as an artist, as an actor, the opportunities that I've gotten to do, honestly, just because I wrote on a dream board what I thought being an actor meant, have just created space to touch at connection. And then you kind of you kind of fall from it. You remember how the world works, and you have to fight to go, no, no, no, no, that one was true. This is the one that's not true. That is true. The thing that we were doing is true. I could feel it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: 41:54

Well, you said our body knows it's I almost want to push back on what you said. You said your body knows it's safe, but as like your body actually knows it's unsafe.

SPEAKER_01: 42:03

Yeah. Your body, yeah. Your body knows it's because it hasn't been safe.

SPEAKER_06: 42:07

I love that sentence. It matters to be brave right now. Your body wants to make it safe, even though historically it hasn't been. And so I can fight through this vulnerability. I can stand here bawling my eyes out because it matters that I'm brave, because this should be safe. It doesn't make sense to me that it's not.

SPEAKER_01: 42:23

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that there's coding in it. Like this is one of the other things that really gets me is I feel like, and you started off by asking who am I? And I mentioned that these days I really identify as a father because it lines me up with my values. Well, one of my values is I'm here to protect my boys. That's it. That's what I do. This like immediately makes me cry just thinking about it. And so part of protecting them has to be being brave enough to rewrite the narrative so that they don't have to have what we had. They're gonna have a different one and it's not gonna be perfect, and they're gonna have to rewrite some part of it again. But if I'm here for status quo and they have to walk through the fire ill-equipped, I already walked through the fire ill-equipped, right? So the tools that I have at my disposal, the foresight, the vision, the time traveling, everything that makes me understand that I am alive should also, for me, offer up space to say, hey, you little people who are also alive, you're gonna feel this one day, and I'm gonna make sure that you know that you belong, that you're enough, that there's space for you, and that you're all part of something bigger. I'm like this with them, I'm like this with their little friends. I am the parent who sits on the floor where the kids are bowling, and I try to teach them to take turns, and I try to teach them to speed, like I can't stop myself because I I think it it matters. It does. And so that idea of being able to hold that space when, like you said, your body doesn't feel like it's safe. But something inside me knows that if I can you have a five-year-old, you probably know the song. The bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountain. Um, I think it's yeah, I think of it all the time. When you're on top of the mountain looking down, jump this bear over the mountain and look down the other side because what's on the other side is glorious, but we gotta get there. And so I'm the bear that's like moving up the mountain with all the cubs, so that we can see what we can see. And all you're gonna see is the other side of the mountain. But like, you need to see the other side of the mountain. We need to be able to expand our viewpoints and our visions.

SPEAKER_03: 44:37

Um we're gonna need a part two. You can come back.

SPEAKER_01: 44:48

I would I would love to.

SPEAKER_03: 44:49

I would just like to ask as we close out, because when we started, I mentioned seven years ago we were in a very different place in our lives, and I've seen you build so much over the last seven years, and so many things that you were dreaming about back then actually manifested. We've talked about the challenges and the belief systems that you've had to unwire to be more authentic, but what about the things that worked? Do you think it was a matter of persistence and resiliency and work ethic? Because I see all of those things in you. Or was there something that shifted in you over the last seven years that you think had to do with being able to bring your dreams to life?

SPEAKER_01: 45:31

Mm-hmm. Yes. Yes, the answer is yes. Both of them, I've always been a person who, and you know this about me, prides myself on my work ethic. I don't take a lot of things lightly. Um I'm I'm actually trying to learn to take a few things more lightly, but I don't take a lot of things lightly. And if I'm gonna do something, I only understand the version where you pour everything that you have into it, potentially until the cup is empty. And it's not always the best, it's not always the best paradigm, but that's what I truly believe. And yet I don't think that you can outwork inaccurate intentions. If you've set sail, I don't want to say on the wrong course, but if you've set sail for the wrong reasons, if you've set sail with a belief system that you don't actually believe that you've adopted to try and find success, I don't think you can outwork that. I think that you will get stuck. And frankly, if I'm being very honest with you, I feel as though lately I'm re-evaluating how I got here because I'm feeling stuck. And so I'm actually this question, it's a pretty prescient question because I'm asking myself that every day. There were a lot of things that worked. The thing that I think that changed the game for me is putting into practice the daily actions, the small, minute daily actions that helped intensify what my intentions were. And those range from caring enough about myself to take five minutes in the morning to see myself, to actually see myself and say, Where are you today? How are you today? Who are you today? Building time for meditation. I'm a person who, when I have a robust meditative practice, I am the best version of me. I really, really am. I I worked with this Swami once who was like, You brush your teeth every morning, but you've never cleaned your mind. How come you don't find that strange? And it ruined brilliant. It broke my brain.

SPEAKER_07: 47:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 47:33

Because it made so much sense. He was like, You clean your nose, yeah. Use a neti pot. You brush your teeth, yeah. You shave, yeah. What about your body? Yeah, yeah, I loofah. Okay, what about your mind? I don't get it. You've never thought about the idea of the impurities in your mind. It's like, oh man, that's gonna hurt when I stop doing it.

SPEAKER_06: 47:50

You can't unlearn, you can't unknow that.

SPEAKER_01: 47:53

You can't unknow that. Yeah, it's like total threshold concept. I don't get to come back from that idea. And so, I mean, those are tiny little things. Some of them are like drinking water. I am terrible at drinking water.

SPEAKER_03: 48:04

I'm so bad at drinking water.

SPEAKER_01: 48:06

I'll go, I'll I'll go like days without it. Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_06: 48:10

I actually like stop bringing, I'm like, I can't bring this on the podcast. It's ridiculous. My giant red jug, but I'm like, I'll put it in a proper cup. That's not my this is not my inner rebel. My inner rebel is drinking a giant red jug all day long.

SPEAKER_01: 48:23

I bought a two-liter jug of water and started carrying it around for years just to almost trick myself into wanting to do it. But I really had to go, I'm a person who has a two-liter jug of water all the time. And then one day I became somebody who started drinking water, and then now I drink ginger beer.

SPEAKER_03: 48:42

Um you consciously changed habits.

SPEAKER_01: 48:44

I consciously changed habits, and I really do think like I consciously addressed the beliefs that were in line with the intentions, and then I was also making sure that I sat down once a day, whether it was the morning or night, and I wrote my intentions out to the universe and I said, Hey, we're doing this together. Here's what I need to co-create with you. Here's my offering for the space that I'm ready to take up. You do you. And like I literally wrote it like that. And both my wife and I did this for a long period of time. But for me, that was one of the biggest things. And I've I actually, at the beginning of every year, I have this like little book that I publish and I sell it to myself. And I essentially go through my past year and celebrate my wins. And I asked myself what lessons I learned in life and what lessons I learned in business, and what lessons I learned in family, and what were the things that I was doing when I was at my most successful. It's the positive stuff. It's not like, why were you bad? It's all the good. And I happened to open up a book from 2015, and I I like had a little cry to myself because they all came true. The entire book was true. Literally, the entire book was true, and it blew my mind.

SPEAKER_06: 49:53

It's manifestation.

SPEAKER_01: 49:55

It's manifestation.

SPEAKER_06: 49:56

You're like, oh, I aligned my actions with my beliefs. I didn't try to outwork energetic misalignment, and I spent time with clarity in my intentions and clearing my mind on a daily basis.

SPEAKER_01: 50:08

And and taking action is the key.

SPEAKER_03: 50:10

This idea that manifestation is just something that happens like poof. But no, it's you're right. You're aligning your actions with your intentions and taking action over and over and over and over and over again.

SPEAKER_06: 50:23

Yeah. Yeah. On repeat. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 50:25

Yeah, you can set the intention, but if there's no action to prove it, and I'm having the biggest struggle right now with it because I'm in a new phase of life where now I have a near five-year-old and a near two-year-old, and the demands on my daily life are different, and I have these businesses that are different on the other side of the pandemic. And so my hours and my days and my weeks are all fractured, and I'm really struggling with how do I create new space for myself in order to do these things that I know design my success. Um and same thing with acting. The only thing that has left over from my acting right now is that I'm unbothered when I get auditions, whether I got auditions, whether I book, how I book. I'm at my lowest booking rate in a very long time. The other day I thought to myself, I should be having a total breakdown. I should be having a total like disconnect from reality. And yet I have this unwavering belief that we'll get there. We'll get there. That intention is so clear for me.

SPEAKER_03: 51:23

We need winters, we need time out to reevaluate where we are and what our vision really is now. Because you're a different person now than the Antonio who dreamed it up in the first place.

SPEAKER_01: 51:34

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's a very fair thing.

SPEAKER_03: 51:37

One final question, really important question before we go.

SPEAKER_01: 51:40

Okay.

SPEAKER_03: 51:40

Because you can see into the future who is gonna win this season of The Bachelor.

SPEAKER_06: 51:46

This is your favorite sport, is The Bachelor.

SPEAKER_01: 51:49

It kind of is a sport. It's its own version of a sport. So here's here's a shocker. I have put a heavy hold on The Bachelor. Not only because the franchise is ridiculous, so of the changes that I'm currently entertaining, and there's more than I could ever even put on this podcast, but one of them is what role does entertainment play in the framing of my beliefs? And what level of energy am I willing to ingest? Because I am a TV addict. I love television. I will watch almost any show, but I came to realize this because my wife is really big into cop shows and detective shows, and I loathe them. I hate them with a passion. And I really had to, over the past like three years, reckon why I hate cop shows, and it's because I think that they are really spewing propaganda. I think they're doing a lot of damage to the public in terms of being able to look at this role that exists in society justly and start to take it apart and ask what it's supposed to be doing, what they're supposed to be doing, what the rules are, what the etc. etc. etc. And so I was like, oh, right. It turns out that I don't watch cop shows not because I think they're bad, but because they butt up against my integrity. They don't resonate. And then I had to start looking at The Bachelor, and then I had the same moment where I was like, oh, I ruined the franchise for myself because this is butting up against something where like I don't want spectacle in humans. I want to find a way to love every human enough that the idea of them making a spectacle of themselves makes me want to, or at the very least, not participate in it. So I'm not watching the bachelor right now.

SPEAKER_03: 53:36

Yeah. Well, there you go. That's lining your integrity with your actions. Yep.

SPEAKER_06: 53:40

And now you lost your bachelor partner, so that's sad too.

SPEAKER_01: 53:44

I know. I'm sorry. It's okay.

SPEAKER_03: 53:46

I have many others.

SPEAKER_06: 53:50

Now you're gonna have to question your integrity, Jeff.

SPEAKER_03: 53:53

This is happening after the show.

SPEAKER_01: 53:54

Don't do it. Please don't do it.

SPEAKER_03: 53:56

I'm perfectly comfortable with my integrity. Antonio, we love you so much. Thank you for taking this time to be here today in your busy life. Love you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01: 54:07

Just appreciate you. Um, this is a great way to start my day. If you want to do this every morning, I'm in.

SPEAKER_03: 54:12

Kind of down. Big commitment, but it's a big commitment.

SPEAKER_01: 54:15

It's moving.

SPEAKER_03: 54:16

I'll let you do all the editing. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 54:19

I've recently loved Mondays because I do my falling for basketball podcast at noon, which is where I'm gonna bounce off this and bounce onto that. And I was saying I don't do a lot of things where I take things lightly. I don't do a lot of things for fun. And when this was pitched to me by by my co-host Bran, my knee-jerk was no, I'm not gonna do it. It's so much work. I'm not gonna watch that many games every week, and I'm gonna feel such pressure. And I was talking to my wife about it. And she was like, just for whatever this is worth, because it sounds like you actually want to do this. You don't do anything for fun. You literally don't have hobbies. And it and it kind of I mean, I I think you have a lot of hobbies.

SPEAKER_02: 54:53

You've just turned all your hobbies into careers.

SPEAKER_01: 54:56

That's what I mean. Everything that I do, I've sort of said, like, wow, okay, I'm gonna stake a claim here, but like I don't knit, I don't draw. When I write, I'm like, I'm gonna write a manuscript.

SPEAKER_03: 55:04

And now you don't watch The Bachelor.

SPEAKER_01: 55:06

Now I don't watch The Bachelor, like it's all disappearing. And so this is like a real fun one. And oftentimes and Brandon and I laugh about this, we watch the games and then we just get on and talk. We don't write anything down. It's so free-flowing and off the cuff, and we probably have three listeners, and like, who cares? It's just fun. So it's nice and just like for fun. And this was beyond nice to do. I mean, I say this was just fun. This was a lot of very vulnerable emotional work, but like that's fun for me.

SPEAKER_03: 55:31

Yeah, it's fun for us too. So thank you for bringing that bringing that to us today. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01: 55:38

Thank you. Thanks for giving me some space for that.

SPEAKER_03: 55:41

Such a pleasure. We love you. Have a great time on your podcast. Thanks. And let's see you again. Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 55:46

Yeah, I would love that.

SPEAKER_03: 55:47

But we don't really have a way we close out. We're like signing off.

SPEAKER_06: 55:51

You like creep slowly backwards. Yeah, dumb. The Homer Simpson gift when he goes into the bush.

SPEAKER_01: 55:57

Back away talking.

SPEAKER_06: 55:59

Yeah, waiting Homer Simpson into the bush at a podcast. That's a good thing.

SPEAKER_07: 56:04

I love that.

SPEAKER_03: 56:14

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