Daniel Weinberg sits down with one of his closest friends and confidants, Steve Fihrer, who became his guide in overcoming his trauma and dealing with his nervous breakdown. Looking back on Daniel’s journey of healing and transformation, they discuss how to take care of your mental health, the dangers of social withdrawal, and the adverse impact of anxiety. They also explore the benefits of undergoing therapy, reading books, and reframing struggles into opportunities for growth.
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Deep Steve – A Friend In Need Is A Friend Indeed
On this episode of the show, we have a very personal conversation with my very good friend, Deep Steve, where we reflect on a terrible time in my life and how he was there for me as a very good friend.
Deep Steve, welcome to the show. How are you?
Thank you for having me. It’s an honor to be on your show.
It’s an honor to have you. Where are you? Where in the world are you?
I’m in a place called Plettenberg Bay in Sunny South Africa. It is a place where most people have their holiday homes. It’s one of those tranquil, magical places where you get to connect with your family, shut out the rest of the world, and do you. It is an amazing, beautiful place. I’d love for you to see it at some point.
I would love to get there. We’ve had quite a long history. In this episode, what I want to focus on is what I would describe as most probably one of the worst points in my life. It’s a very personal discussion both for me and for you. What I want to talk about, and maybe give the audience some color around, was how it was to experience me in such a low state and how it affected you as a close friend.
Introducing Steve Fihrer AKA Deep Steve
From my perspective, I’m forever grateful to you for being there for me at that time and giving me some of the tools and some of the pearls of wisdom that helped contribute to my getting myself out of that mess. Before we dive in, I want to give a little bit of background. We met each other circa, I would like to think, 2004, 2005, or something like that, perhaps. You are from South Africa originally. When did you move to Australia?
That’s about right. I’m originally from Johannesburg. I had been living in New York and Toronto for about 11 or 12 years. I was ready for my next move to Sydney around 2004. I’d done my time with the cold weather of Toronto. There was a point in time where I had to make a move before having kids, whether I wanted to sustain my life in a cold climate, or if I could move to a climate that was more preferable. I made that move in 2004, and I was fortunate enough to meet you towards the beginning of 2004.
I remember the evening we met. We clicked and then became brothers. We became very close. In early 2022, I suffered what would be described as a nervous breakdown, whereby I completely imploded. I had multiple things going on in my life, both at the business side and the relationship side, and even the physical health side. It was a bit of a trifecta of bad things that happened to me. It is irrelevant what the causes are. The way I responded to it is of more relevance.
I effectively broke down. I fell into a million pieces. I wasn’t sleeping. The adrenaline levels were at max 24/7. I was very on edge and tense. I had the circular chat going on in my head, which I could not stop. There were unlimited voices of the itty bitty shitty committee. There was total crap going on in my head. I was in flight mode or panic mode. It was almost an out-of-body experience.
While I was going through that period, if I were to reflect on my original responses at the beginning of that period, I was feeling a lot of shame. I didn’t want to go out in public. I could barely socialize. I was living away from a lot of my friends who are spread abroad, so it’s easier to hide for me. You were living in Australia, and I was living in Israel at the time. My communication dropped off. I had a lot of feelings of shame.
When I finally started to open up about it, you were one of the first people that I opened up to, and thankfully, because when I started opening up to you, to my benefit, you welcomed me with open arms. You were extremely non-judgmental. Even more so, I felt like you understood where I was at. You also gave me amazing advice and tools that I could use that you’d learned yourself.
The two key ones that are of significance that I recall very well, because they had such an impact, were that you made me go and buy and read the book by Michael Singer called Untethered Soul, which I still have a few pristine copies of. I hand them out. I give other people who come into my life who are going through very tough periods of their life what I call the Deep Steve Playbook, which is Michael Singer’s Untethered Soul. You then made me sign up for Sam Harris’s Waking Up app to get myself into meditation, which I did.
What became a very challenging period in my life almost became like a singularly focused project. I almost dropped everything. The project was, “How do I recover? How do I rebuild?” As if the house had been burnt down, it was like, “How do I do a complete rebuild?” I’ll stop there. That’s how I initially experienced what I was going through and my experience with you.
We’ve never spoken about it, so this is a reflection or a look-back review on that time. What is intriguing to me, and maybe could be helpful to others out there, is when you saw one of your best mates at 64 kilos. I dropped about 12 to 15 kilos. I was pretty emaciated. My energy was zapped. I was most probably unrecognizable. I’m a pretty high-energy individual. I had no energy. It was all of that combined.
You didn’t see me. We were thousands of miles away. I’d love to hear from your perspective. In that initial period, if you can recall, how was it to see me, in that light, completely broken? How did it make you feel? How did you deal with it? How did you manage to manage me? That would be the best way to put it. You came and visited. You came to town, and I didn’t have much time for you because I was ashamed to be around people.
Correct. We have a close friend who warned me that things weren’t good with you, but I had no clue whatsoever about the level of it. He forced you to come to dinner. You probably wouldn’t have come to that dinner. I felt like I was hyperventilating when I saw you. There were other people around at the dinner, and I couldn’t talk to you in the way I would normally talk to you.
The first experience of it, I will never forget it as long as I live. I was struggling at a very profound level. I could not understand what I was seeing. Let me go back a second to juxtapose the two people, the Daniel Weinberg that I experienced up until that point of you walking into that restaurant. It was a Japanese restaurant. We had a beautiful table in the corner. It was a celebration for me of you and Clinton, my two very good friends, coming together. You guys were a new friendship, but it was a very warm and loving friendship. It accelerated quite quickly. For me, it was a celebration of being together.
There were two Daniel Weinbergs in my mind. There was the Daniel Weinberg that the world knew, and that Daniel Weinberg that I knew. What I mean by that is Daniel Weinberg was extremely successful, very popular, well-liked, always happy, always the center of attention, incredibly personable, larger than life, and successful in the material world, the business world, and all those things. I liked that, but what I liked was that there was a personal connection. There was a way of communicating with me and connecting with me that was different from most of the people in my life. I love that connection. There was something more. There was something deeper that Daniel Weinberg had that I loved and enjoyed about being in his company.
I will never analyze this ever, but from a selfish perspective, it would be disappointing if I arrived at a party and he wasn’t around. I go looking for him. That was how it was. That guy was going to be like that forever, and that’s how it was going to be. I don’t necessarily know what my thinking was in terms of why or how he would always be that, but I probably, from a selfish perspective, enjoyed that. It was something that I was getting for my own personal well-being and for my own enjoyment.
I walk into this restaurant, and I can’t catch my breath because this person is emaciated. They are not the human being that I know. The shock is beyond belief. I am trying to digest what I’m seeing in front of my eyes, but I can’t because there’s a disconnect. Nothing informs me of it. Nothing can explain to me how this could have happened.
How was I with you?
Blank.
I wasn’t there.
I kept on trying to touch you. I kept on trying to touch your hand or your arm.
I was in the room, but I was a zombie.
Daniel Weinberg had left the building.
It’s a freak-out because you can’t believe it, but at the same time, the only thing that informs you in that moment is, “I’ve been here, so I know what’s going on here.” This person is in a loop. Something has occurred for trauma to be at this level. Since I’ve been there, I can instinctively know what needs to happen. There can be no analysis, and there can be no discussion. There can only be, “We’ve got to make sure that he now doesn’t go deeper and doesn’t fall more. He needs to be secured. He needs to be loved up. He needs to be comforted.
Nothing can happen that can cause any more damage, and then possibly get to the bottom of what has caused this and then support him and allow him to come through this.” It was because of my experience with him up until that point, I knew there were unbelievable rivers of depth that would allow him to do that, but there was no rush. Praise God, that process could begin.
I have to say, without getting into all of that process at this point, that the one thing one doesn’t know at that point is whether the person will allow you in and whether they will be able to be supportive. You used an expression earlier on. You said, “I made you do it.” You can’t make anyone do it. They have to be a willing partner. That’s the one thing about you that most other people don’t have, which was a joy for me. It was that when the time came, you were more than fucking willing. You were like, “Bring it, baby.” That didn’t happen quickly. It wasn’t an immediate thing.
The defensive position of most in this position is to fend anyone away and not allow them in. I was not fucking having that. I got COVID a day or two after that dinner. I made it my last mission at that point to focus on you. I said to my partner that night, when we got back to the hotel room, what I felt for my friend. Everything got dropped for me in my world.
People dealing with trauma usually take a defensive position by fending people away and not allowing them in. Share on XI said, “Something is terribly wrong. I need to get to the bottom of this. Until I do, I’m not coming up here.” She said to me, “That’s great. You need to do that. You do what you have to do.” I said, “If he pushes me away, he pushes me away, but I’m not going without a fight.” Some of the commercial things that you were dealing with at the point in time, you had to be in war mode. You were in war mode, and you were functioning. You were still functioning, but it wasn’t the Daniel that I knew. It was more like you were in this war-like emergency mode, which forced you to fuck.
I’d call it autopilot. I was lacking emotion.
We did have one with no emotion about it, where I said to you, “There are two aspects to this thing in your recovery. The one is you need to fuck up now like a mad person.” You said to me, “Why?” I said, “You will regret it if you do not. I’m telling you that in your heart, your mind, and the person that you used to be, and you want to trust me on this, that person will want to have fought. Whether you win or lose commercially will be irrelevant. The one thing about you is you’re not a person who gives up.” You said, “I don’t know if I have it in me.” I said, “You do, and you don’t have a choice.”
That’s another thing on that point. Up until that experience, if you were to ask me to assess myself on how resilient I was, I would’ve given myself a bit of a C minus. I’d never thought of myself as someone with deep resilience. Post that, my self-reflection differs greatly from that. Everybody’s going to experience something in their life at some point, which is, within their world, going to be deemed to be very challenging, difficult, or however you want to describe it. Once you go through those experiences, you realize that in the end, everything will be okay. If it’s not okay, then it’s not the end.
I love that.
What that means is that you realize no matter how bad things get, everything ends up being okay. It’s what you make of it. Relatively, what you also learn is not to react when things go wrong. Sometimes, things go wrong. You have to be accepting of it. One of the things that I can laugh at that you were saying to me at the time, which I struggled with, and I didn’t see until after, was, “You’re going through something very challenging in your life. I know you’re devastated and upset.”
You reframed it for me and said, “You might not see it right now, but this is a gift. This is an opportunity. How are you going to respond to this? What are you going to do with this? The lessons and what you learn from them.” At the time, I wanted to punch you in the face when you tried to convince me of the gift.
I remember it.
When I look back, you couldn’t have been more right. It is a huge gift to go through difficult things in life. Life is about experiences and growth. I strongly believe that unless you go through these very difficult experiences in life, you don’t grow as people. We’re only here for a very short visit on earth. When you get to have these lessons or these growth experiences, if one can learn to be thankful for them, your life will be a whole lot better.
Steve’s Trauma Experience
I want you to talk a little bit about why the Sam Harris podcast and why Michael Singer’s Untethered Soul. You talk about your own experiences that you’ve had in the past. Like everyone, you’ve had your own challenges in life. Tell me why they were so helpful to you and why you thought they would be of such great value to me. Maybe go a little bit into the history of what you experienced, to put things in perspective.
I don’t think you can understand another human being’s trauma until you’ve truly had some of your own. That’s my experience of it. I’m not a professional in that sense. It’s like with like. My trauma occurred when I was carjacked in South Africa. As soon as I came out of university, I started working with my father and my uncle in business.
I’d come home from a night of work and was going to visit a friend of mine. Four guys pulled me over, and before I knew it, there were guns in my face. The potential for death was immediate. They beat the crap out of me, and they intended to kill me. It never happened. I survived that. The very next day, a very good friend of mine was shot and killed, and then a girlfriend of mine was shot. Three weeks later, she survived.
The trauma of those three weeks was so profound, but I didn’t know that I was in trauma. I was doing the same things that you spoke about when you came to dinner that night. I was eating and drinking alcohol. I was going out all the time. I was the opposite. I was extroverting, but with massive trauma going on on the inside. I would be outside partying, but the exact opposite was going on on the inside.
You were suppressing everything and trying to numb it with everything else on top of it.
Correct. I was pushing it down. The more it came up, the more I needed to push it down. The extremes were always occurring. The next extreme was the lack of eating. I found running, but I was running not normally. I was like Forrest Gump, running a kilometer a day. I was running 30 or 40 K. Nothing was balanced. There was no opportunity to express one’s feelings.
I did have a brief moment of therapy, but unfortunately, I was bolting from South Africa. I was running from the trauma. The therapist had said to me, “This type of trauma will cause you to go into extreme positions, and you can spot it in someone else.” I never had the chance to work through it properly. In Canada, I ended up having a girlfriend break up with me. I thought the trauma was the girlfriend breaking up with me, but it was at that point that I got into real therapy and the discovery of the real trauma that had occurred 3 or 4 four years prior.
Watching you walk into that restaurant that night, I knew it was happening again. I started to become aware of what you were experiencing. The things that you talk about, the book, the meditation, and all these things are a theme of everything will be okay. That’s quite an evolved belief system in terms of understanding that things that are external to you are truly external to you. Your happiness and your degree of comfort are not based on those things working out.
I can talk for myself. Most men, I believe, go from a very young age wanting to be successful in business and achieve things. Often, we link our happiness to external relationships, external successes, and all these things. It is very deeply embedded in us. It takes quite an experience as a human being to understand that true happiness, true joy, and connection are not about these goals and these things that we believe we need to be.
If we can do something with those expectations, remove those things, and find things that are directly related to our true well-being, like meditation and like the things that they refer to in the book, it’s a new journey. I have to say, one thing that is required is a belief in trusting your friend or whoever is coming to your aid. That’s the risk. The risk is that you choose not to go down that road.
I have a friend who, unfortunately, is no longer with us, who was struggling, suffering, and wasn’t able to reach out, connect, open up, and understand that he would’ve been able to get either professional help, friend help, or something. That’s one thing that you did unbelievably well. You say you wanted to punch me in the face. I remember the moment. I remember getting in your face and constantly being there. There were times when I felt resistance, and I was fearful that you were going to pull away completely, but I had a deep feeling inside that there was a sense of what was needed. You kept on coming for more.
I have a different view from you of your resilience. My experience of you prior to you having any trauma is that you are one of the most resilient human beings I’ve ever known. Maybe that’s not something you have a consciousness about. I’m fortunate enough to know both your parents. There is a well of unbelievable emotion that’s so magnificent. It’s caring, loving, calm, decent, and empathetic.
This is the ATAR personality that wants to succeed in the world, but not for the sake of other people saying so. There’s a deep need for you to achieve things. That’s part of your success. It’s not about everyone patting you on the back or this idea of getting runs on the board. Whether the success is determined by financial or helping others, I find that you have a massive impact in the world in terms of the help that you provide others with, your connection to people, and your achievements. They’re all part of a similar theme of wanting to impact the world, because deep down, you are a calm, caring, and empathetic person. I don’t think you’re as connected to it as I have a sense of it.
The Most Important Tools To Healing
I appreciate that. If I have to reflect on the tools that were of huge benefit in the process, firstly, I was doing therapy twice a week with an incredible therapist. I was reading your book or Michael Singer’s book. I was also reading in parallel one of Eckhart Tolle’s books. The Power of Now is the book. I read those two books on repeat. I was doing the meditation app, trying to meditate every day. I was trying to exercise, whether it was a walk or the gym. I got into the gym.
One of the most significant components of the program was my opening up to my tribe, which predominantly consisted of a few close male friends. I also had one, in particular, female friend who has been in my life for many years. My tribe was extremely supportive and loving, and held space for me. Not only that, once I introduced all the drama and the complexities of what was going on in my life, what ended up happening was they opened up with the traumas and the challenges that they’ve had or were having in their lives.
That one-on-one deep emotional relationship that I had with these individuals grew exponentially. Our relationship grew exponentially because of what I had experienced and my opening up to you. I recall you were checking in with me almost on a daily basis. Sometimes, those calls would go on for significant amounts of time. I’m forever grateful for that.
It was those acts of kindness that were paramount to my ability to start again, reset, rebuild, and look at the whole experience as a gift and a rebirth of some description. I wanted to say thank you from the bottom of my heart for being there for me and for showing me the love and care that you did, because I truly felt it. I felt like not only were you for me, but I felt that you were with me. I felt like you were with me on the journey.
If I have to go back and think about how I was in those first six months of 2022, I don’t think I was able to smile. I would be in the room with my kids and seeing them playing, and I couldn’t even smile on the inside. It took a long time to be able to smile again. I don’t think people realize what that is like until you can’t.
We take a lot of things for granted in life for what they are and only realize how valuable and special some of these things are when they’re gone. We’re always talking about gratitude and being grateful. I cannot instill in people enough what it means to be truly grateful for the very simple things in life, which people take as the default or the norm. They can be easily taken away from you in a moment.
I want to say thank you. You’ve been a great friend since we met. Thank you for coming on the show, and thank you for doing this deep analysis or reflection on that period. I can easily talk about it, which is a very good sign. I don’t hang onto it. I never ever think about it. It made me become much more present, simply because when you stop thinking about the past or even the future, your brain real estate has the present to think about. You have so much more capacity for the present.
Answering Rapid-Fire Questions
There have been a lot of very positive outcomes that have come from the experience, including having deeper relationships with Deep Steve. Before we finish, at the end of every show, I like to ask my guests a series of five questions. I’m going to ask you those questions. You can answer in any way you like. It’s quick-fire responses. If I were to ask you who you would like to say sorry to, given the chance, who would that be?
I’d have to say sorry to myself.
I like that.
I was way too harsh.
You were too harsh on yourself.
When kindness and caring were needed, there was no capacity for that. There was a harsh approach. There was no room for falling. There was no time for it, and there was no understanding of it. It was a very judgmental, cold place.
What are you proud of being or doing in your life?
The thing I’m most proud of is my two children.
Fatherhood. When did you receive kindness while needing it most?
The most kindness that I’ve ever received in my life came from you and Clinton during a difficult time that I had. It came out in an abundance of love and warmth. I was enveloped in caring and kindness when it felt like the last thing that I wanted around me. It was quite profound in terms of you being there all the time and not being interested in anything else but the best for me.
What did your mother or father teach you that you frequently remind yourself of?
The thing from my childhood that I remember the most in terms of my mother and my father was the profound caring and empathy for others, always being aware of what was happening for others, connected to what others were experiencing, and doing the things that were needed to be supportive of friends, family, and the people you loved.
Profound caring and empathy for others is one of the most valuable attitudes any person can have. Share on XFinally, what is Deep Steve’s superpower besides being deep?
It comes in the name. I used to look at it as very negative. I didn’t like the fact that I was so sensitive. I didn’t like that I had sensitivity and that I could cry at the drop of a hat. I always thought of that as a weakness. I was at a conference. Someone came and put their hand on my shoulder and said, “That sensitivity and that crying that you’re feeling ashamed of is a superpower. It’s a clearing.
Once that crying stops, you are very powerful in the next moment. You are so powerful that you can be in the room to solve major problems for people because you’re clear. Rather than running away from it, come towards the light and come towards that feeling. Engage and feel good about that sensitivity.” That was a game-changer for me. Seeing that as a superpower and being able to care for and love those that you care about, I see it as something that I wouldn’t want to ever live without.
That’s very cool. Thank you. I appreciate your time.
Namaste.
We will talk on the other side.
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About Steve Fihrer
“I was born in Johannesburg, South Africa and attended Jewish day school there. I graduated from university with a Bcomm(accounting) from the University of the Witwatersrand and thereafter joined my father and uncle in the family business. After experiencing personal violence in South Africa, I immigrated to Toronto, Canada and was privileged to work for diverse companies in Finance and banking. My wife and I immigrated to Australia where I worked in investment banking(capital raising) and private equity.”
