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Human School

Human School

Written by: Miles Adcox
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About this listen

We’ve been taught everything except how to be human. In a world obsessed with output, Human School is where we study what happens within. This podcast was born from a journal entry during a breakdown. A reminder that struggle isn’t weakness - it’s instruction.

Human School reframes pain as purpose, productivity as presence, and leadership as inner clarity. We’re building the education we never got. Through stories, tools, and raw conversations, we help people stop performing their lives–and start participating in them.

Welcome to Human School.

Miles Adcox
Self-Help Success
Episodes
  • Hunter Hayes: Chasing My Version of The Dream
    Mar 4 2026

    With campuses near Nashville and San Diego,Onsite supports people navigating burnout, relationship strain, addiction, trauma, or the sense that life feels off. Learn more at experienceonsite.com or call 1-800-341-7432. A simple conversation can be the first step toward livingmore fully.
    What if the music you've been making your whole life was actually the therapy you never knew you needed?

    What if chasing someone else's version of success is the very thing keeping you from discovering who you actually are?


    Hunter Hayes has been on stages since he was a toddler. He earned Grammy nominations before most people have figured out what they want to do with their lives. He toured with Taylor Swift, scored radio hits, and built the kind of career that looks flawless from the outside. But behind all of it was a kid whofelt deeply lonely, who learned early that love and acceptance were things you earned by performing, and who spent years chasing a version of success that someone else had defined for him.

    In this episode, Hunter goes into the emotional terrain behind his music: the relationship between performance and belonging, the cost of tying your identity to external validation from the time you're five years old, and what it feels like when early success levels off and you must decide who you are. Hereveals how years of therapy, intensive work, and learning to understand his brain finally gave him permission to stop performing his life and start participating in it. He shares the moment that songwriting stopped being about writing hits and became therapy set to a melody.

    What makes this conversation unique is that Hunter and Miles don't just talk about the destination, they walk through the actual work. This is a conversation about what it looks like to come back to yourself after years of giving yourself away and how creativity, when it's rooted in honesty rather than performance, can become the most powerful tool for healing you've ever had.


    In this conversation, you'll learn:

    • How to Use Songwriting, Journaling, or Any Creative Outlet as a Form of Emotional Processing
    • How to Rebuild Your Identity When Your Career Has Always Been Your Entire Senseof Self
    • How to Redefine Success So the Numbers Stop Running Your Life
    • How to Invite Your Inner Child Back Into Your Creative Process Instead of Locking Him Out
    • How to Protect Your Energy on Social Media Without Disappearing
    • How to Find the People in Your Life Who See You for Who You Are, Not Just What You Produce
    • How to Use Structure, Checklists, and Consistency as Mental Health Tools
    • How to Write About Where You Want to Be Before You've Arrived There
    • How to Be Proud of Yourself Out Loud Even When the Road Looked Messy From the Outside


    Follow Human School: YouTube - Human School Podcast Instagram - @humanschoolofficial Threads - @humanschoolofficial TikTok - @humanschoolofficial


    What We Discuss:

    00:00:00 Welcome to Human School00:02:30 Why Hunter Spent 10 Years Chasing Someone Else's Version of the Dream00:05:00 What's Different About Hunter Today00:06:35 How an Onsite Intensive Became a Turning Point00:08:28 The Music That Taught Hunter He Had Permission to Write With Hope00:12:55 Music at Two Years Old and a Career No One Planned00:34:07 The Move to Music City from Louisiana00:43:15 Songwriting Became His Version of Journaling00:46:58 The Loneliness That Hid Inside an Idealistic Childhood00:56:25 The Sentence That Shattered Him at 1501:02:40 Letting the Inner Child Back Into the Creative Work01:05:30 Transactional and Purely Relational Friendships01:16:12 Storm Warning, Dan Huff, and the Radio Tour That Changed Everything01:26:48 Navigating Life After the Biggest Season of Early Success01:32:50 Why He Started Talking Openly About Mental Health01:39:46 Learning to Fly and the Life Metaphors Hidden Inside Every Pre-Flight Checklist01:48:04 The New Project: Evergreen Season One01:53:40 How Hunter Manages Social Media Without Letting It Manage Him

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    1 hr and 59 mins
  • Dr. Neil Bomar: Why Small "Paper Cuts" Do More Damage Than Big Injuries
    Feb 25 2026
    Learn more about Onsite and Milestones at experienceonsite.com or call 1-800-341-7432. A simple conversation can be the first step toward living more fully.What if the wounds you can't name are doing more damage than the ones you can? What if healing doesn't happen in a sterile office, but around a campfire, in a community, or on a paddleboard?Dr. Neil Bomar, Vice President of Medical Services at Milestones, is not your typical psychiatrist. He's a man who spent years trying to fit inside the box of Western medicine before realizing the box wasn't right for him. He traded the "treat 'em and street 'em" model of traditional medicine for a radically human approach to psychiatry. An approach that blends neuroscience, experiential therapy, and the healing power of nature and genuine connection. In this conversation, Dr. Bomar opens up about his own "death day," the childhood moment that quietly rewired how he moved through the world. He shares what it was like to discover, well into his career, that his infectious enthusiasm and relentless positivity were, in part, a defense mechanism against pain. He goes deep into the surreal Thanksgiving when a bullet fell from the sky, struck him in the nose, and lodged in his cheek. And why, even then, his developmental wounding left the deeper mark. Miles and Dr. Bomar explore the dangerous myth that you must choose between brokenness and resilience, the subtle harm of toxic positivity, and why leading with your highlight reel is the fastest way to kill real intimacy. They introduce frameworks like "death days," event trauma versus developmental wounding, and angel work, making complex psychological concepts feel like something you'd hear from a trusted friend. In this conversation, you'll learn:How to Tell the Difference Between Event Trauma and Developmental Wounding How to Stop Weaponizing Your Story and Start Letting It Work For You How to Recognize Your "Death Day" How Toxic Positivity Can Be Just as Damaging as Toxic Negativity How Your Deepest Wound Is Often the Hidden Root of Your Greatest Strength How to Identify the "Angels" in Your StoryHow to Know When You've Crossed from Doing the Work into Over-Identifying with Your Pain How to Choose Being Relational Over Being Right in Every Room You Enter How Community Heals What Therapy Alone Cannot Follow Human School: YouTube - Human School Podcast Instagram - @humanschoolofficial Threads - @humanschoolofficial TikTok - @humanschoolofficialWhat We Discuss:00:00 Meet Dr. Neil Bomar 00:04:35 Why Dr. Bomar Left Traditional Medicine Behind 00:10:01 A Western Medicine Doctor Meets Experiential Therapy00:11:27 The Family Intensive at Onsite That Changed Everything00:13:40 What He Learned About Sadness Growing Up00:14:40 "Happy Jack": The Public Man, the Private Reality, and the Weight of Both 00:21:29 The "Goodness of Fit" Theory: Feeling Like an Outlier in Your Own Family00:26:30 What Is Developmental Wounding?00:27:30 "Death Day": The Childhood Moment That Quietly Rewires Your Identity 00:29:49 A Bullet Fell From the Sky00:33:00 Event Trauma vs. Developmental Wounding: Which One Is Actually Harder to Heal 00:38:30 What Is Trauma, Really? Cutting Through the Expert Debate to What Actually Matters 00:44:06 What He Heard It 25 Years Too Late 00:48:57 Overcompensating From Insecurity00:54:00 Angel Work: Identifying the People Who Saw You Before You Saw Yourself 00:57:45 The Bravest Thing a Leader Can Say 00:58:36 Leading With Your Highlight Reel vs. Your Failures01:00:27 Over-Identifying With Your Illness: Where Healing Ends and Victimhood Begins 01:05:35 Angel Work Healing That No Playbook Could Have Predicted 01:09:07 What a Client Said About Milestones That Stopped Him Cold01:19:09 A Question That Changes Everything - Being Right or Being Relational01:25:51 What Miles & Dr. Bomar Into Now01:29:58 Dr. Bomar's Parting Message to Listeners
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    1 hr and 33 mins
  • Shawn & Andrew East: Managing High-Stakes Pressure in Every Season of Life
    Feb 18 2026

    With campuses near Nashville and San Diego, Onsite supports people navigating burnout, relationship strain, addiction, trauma, or the sense that life feels off. Learn more at experienceonsite.com or call 1-800-341-7432. A simple conversation can be the first step toward living more fully.

    What if the discipline that made you a champion is the same thing quietly destroying your most important relationships?

    What happens when two elite athletes stop chasing gold medals and start chasing something far more meaningful — each other, their kids, and a life that actually feels like home?

    Shawn Johnson East is an Olympic gold medalist and one of the most decorated gymnasts in American history. Andrew East is a former NFL long snapper, entrepreneur, and now holds a doctorate in psychology. Together, they've built a marriage, a family of three young kids, businesses, and a media platform in full public view. But what stands out in this conversation is the radical honesty they bring to the parts of their story.

    In this deeply personal conversation, Shawn opens up about the dark side of elite gymnastics — going professional at 12, being trained to go emotionally numb under pressure, and how that survival skill followed her into adulthood and marriage. She reveals her years-long battle with disordered eating and how retiring from gymnastics left her without an identity. Andrew shares the performance anxiety that blindsided him and how losing football forced a painful gift that ultimately shaped everything good that came next. He also opens up about losing his father, Guy East, and how his dad's relentless curiosity modeled the kind of partner and father he's worked hard to become.

    We talk about what it means to protect a marriage when the odds are stacked against you, and why commitment, not chemistry alone, is the thing that makes it last. Shawn and Andrew also share more about their upcoming book, The Courage to Commit, and how the title is the foundation of how they live their lives.

    In this conversation, you'll learn:

    • How to Use Your Athletic Background to Build a Stronger Marriage
    • How Going Numb Under Pressure Creates Hardness at Home and What to Do About It
    • How to Navigate the Identity Crisis That Comes After Leaving a High-Performance Career
    • How to Recognize When Your Greatest Strength Has a Shadow Side That's Hurting the People You Love
    • How to Create Daily and Weekly Rhythms That Keep a Marriage Connected Without Over-Complicating It
    • How to Relearn How to Play, Fail, and Start Over After Reaching the Top of Your Craft
    • How to Use Curiosity Instead of Criticism When You Don't Understand Your Partner
    • How to Commit Fully to Something and Discover That Sticking With It Creates Beauty You Could Never Have Planned

    Welcome to Human School, where we learn what matters most - Miles Adcox

    Follow Human School:

    YouTube - Human School Podcast

    Instagram - @humanschoolofficial

    Threads - @humanschoolofficial

    TikTok - @humanschoolofficial

    What We Discuss:

    00:00:00 Meet Shawn and Andrew East

    00:05:02 The Athletic Brain Meets Married Life

    00:08:34 The Special Forces Experience

    00:10:21 Going Professional at 12

    00:13:26 Two Different People Behind Closed Doors

    00:15:15 The Debate That Started an Honest Marriage Conversation

    00:18:23 Andrew's Dad Taught Him About Curiosity

    00:22:00 Having Each Other Changed What Was Possible

    00:27:52 Their Marriage Game Plan Day to Day

    00:37:47 What Miles Learned Watching Thousands of Couples

    00:40:27 Having Kids Rewired Andrew's View of Optimization

    00:44:12 Depression, Eating Disorders, and Breaking the Cycle

    00:51:27 The Career He Thought Would Last 15 Years

    00:56:18 How to Navigate a Major Life Transition

    01:01:04 Miles's Two-Word Prayer That Got Him Through His Darkest Season

    01:03:32 What The East's Are Most Excited About Right Now

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    1 hr and 11 mins
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