#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing? | Modern Wisdom

Dr. John De Loney. Welcome to the show.

My man, Chris. How are you?

Thanks for the— dude, I'm fantastic.

I love being back in Texas where I was born and raised, man.

It's good. Are you adjusting?

I am slowly becoming native.

Someone told me that I was allowed to use the word y 'all because I've been here for three years now.

That's a huge, uh, that's a huge welcome, Matt.

I get the sense— That's big, man!

I get the sense that it is me being conned into saying the equivalent of the N -word - Protecting people.

And the Texas Tribune is gonna catch me hard -R -ing my way through all a couple of times.

So I'm not falling for the, the psy -op.

I, I can't, I can't quite get to that.

I'm up to the sidewalk and, and, and trashcan, but you all not yet.

What's the, what's the alternative to the trashcan?

Rubbish. Oh yeah. You gotta be careful with rubbish bin here.

Rubbish bin. Yeah. You don't know what that means.

Crack that up. Come on, get it in here.

All right. You've been waiting for this.

I've been excited for this moment.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you'll have an unlimited amount going to the office soon.

Well, I appreciate that.

in your sunrise for you excellent this is my first one this is my uh live review cherry popper that's outstanding that's outstanding well done man thank you well done good good yeah it's uh you're now five IQ points smarter ten let's see each sip is like set man they light me up like a christmas tree half a standard deviation all right um i have no idea how I didn't stumble across you and the work that you do Because it aligns so much with lots of the things I'm very interested in and I really appreciate the way that you are firm but gentle and reassuring.

I think when you speak to people, a lot of the conversations around relationships and dating and mental health tend to me to either be so soft as to not have an impact are so brusque and harsh as to cause people to get defensive and for it to feel a little bit more about the host or the commentator, the advice giver than it is about the person who has the problem, so yeah I think really, really great.

I appreciate that. You're voting to balance that.

I wanted so badly to be the humor man of mental health and of relationships and early on it was very clear that's not why people wanna talk to you, They've never seen a big, tall, loud tattooed -up Texan talk to that mother who just blew her life up compassionately.

And I think in our strange little weird ecosystem that we live in, there's a lot of people that know about stuff, and they've just never sat with hurting people, right?

There's a lot of theories and a lot of ideas, but man, you can hear somebody who's actually sat with somebody who just lost a child, and there's a different level of compassion, right?

What have you learned about how to hold space for somebody that's going through a difficult time...

From my first ever relationship just broke up with me all the way through to the, I just lost a child.

Dude let me tell you this.

So my wife, she was a research professor, she quit her job for, she's like, I want to stay at home and have kids, that was just like like who are you what you've done with my wife it was amazing we talked through it was awesome and gets pregnant miscarriage number one gets pregnant miscarriage number two then miscarriage number three no but it was an ectopic pregnancy and it ruptured right and so she's a really strong tough West Texas woman and she sits in that living room and says I'm not doing this it's not happening again which you know like I mean she almost died in our living room well here's

the after miscarriage one and especially number two, lucky for her she was married to a guy working on his second PhD and I was also a crisis got a word that gives me hemorrhoids expert and so I would show up in the community to sit with people who had loss and dude I rubbed her nose in my charts and my graphs and my answers and then this happened so a close friend of mine who's suffered imagine an unimaginable loss I show up with my son who was four at the time we go to the ER their wheel in her back and when you show up at crisis scenes it's hard to describe there can be blood on the wall and bodies

but you make eye contact with other responders and you know the scenes safe you know it seems classic and then there's something we call crazy eyes you look across and it's like oh this seems to live like there might be a shooter still here right and you can see it and I walked in and I some made eye contact with the head of OBGYN out at Texas Tech Medical Center.

And I remember holding my son's hand saying, Oh, this is it.

It's the last time I see her.

They wheel her off, I text somebody to come pick my son up, I go to this little room that's about this big, and a buddy of mine, a West Texas rancher who's a children's author walks in, hat everything, he's taller than me, he nods, I say nothing, he says nothing, he sits by me, 30 minutes, one hour, one and a half hours, two hours, then the physician busts the door holding up like a iPad thing, and she says, we lost the baby, but your wife's okay.

And I exhaled in this rancher who hadn't spoken other than, hey, he reaches over and grabs my shoe and I look over at him and he starts crying tears, I don't have yet.

But the important thing is he said no words, and it didn't matter.

And in a culture that we won't shut up, Chris, when your as a break up, golly, dude, the last thing they need is all of your theories and answers, and oh my gosh, let's Google it.

It's catastrophic, they just need to just sit there and bring tacos, bring a bottle of wine, or bring whatever you got in the fridge, you know what I mean?

And we don't have a culture of presence, we have a culture of answers, of talking.

So what I've learned over the years—what do you say to a mother whose kid is dead in that room right there?

Nothing. But she'll remember that hug, right?

She'll remember that exhale.

And that will get her to the next gulp of air, to the next gulp of air, right?

There's just no words, man.

And so the more I've been sitting with hurting people, I'm finding myself talking less and less and less and less.

The most beautiful story, and the first time that I ever really started thinking about this, was Shaun Strickland on Theo Von Spodkin a year ago when Shaun has that really bad experience reliving his childhood.

And Charlie Hooper from Charisma on Command did this unbelievable breakdown, he's redone it, again he's run it back on his other channel, and it's so beautiful, he just explains, Shaun is sort of gripping this bottle with his left hand, he's drinking from it like this, and can see his grasping with this left hand.

He's actually trying to grip onto something.

He's trying to get a hold of security and firmness.

And Charlie's breaking down his body language.

You can see what Theo does that drops him in and then pulls him out.

And then he goes back in again because Theo kind of, it doesn't make it about him.

He does like a triple A.

I don't want to give any shade on Theo.

He literally inspired me to become a better space holder, not a communicator in difficult times.

But there's some things that you do that just rip someone out just a little bit.

And then they close off and they, Well, you know, like, what does it matter?

I'm a big guy, I'm a grown adult.

And then he sort of starts to get back into it, starts to get back into it.

And then, the most beautiful thing that Theo says in that entire exchange is, he's like, we don't need to talk, man.

We can just sit here for a while if you want.

That's it. And that's somebody who only knows that, because they've been hurt too.

Right? I'm not good enough to say anything.

I'll just sit here with you.

Powerful, dude. What a gift. What else?

So, shut up. Yeah. One of the first things that you should do, and— trying to help somebody that's going through stuff.

What else? Yeah, I think that sounds easy in theory, but I think the what else happens before.

I have to do my own work that I believe I'm worthy of the space I'm gonna hold with you, right?

So I gotta show up okay.

Most of the people, I say most of the people who get diagnosed with cancer, who lose a loved one, who lose a pregnancy, et cetera, they'll tell you they found themselves responsible for making sure everybody else was okay.

and don't text somebody, how's it going?

You really want to know how's it going, right?

And I'm gonna text that back to you.

Bring food, show up.

I mean, I think it's action, it's action, it's action, it's action.

I'm gonna to go mow your lawn and I trust you to tell me to stop.

I'm gonna keep sending tacos and you may have 5 ,000 tacos and they may go straight to the trash can, but you're gonna know when the fog lifts you were loved, you were cared.

Yeah, you're cared for.

Yeah, I had an incident that opened up something similar.

It was my birthday a couple of weeks ago and I finished recording upstairs, finished this episode and came down and Jonathan, who's outside, his dog was walking around.

I was like, what the fuck is Jonathan's dog doing here?

Oh, he must be here to show us the new merch samples because we're starting to get merch done.

And as I walked in it turned out that there was a surprise birthday celebration for me.

And there was only five people there.

All of them worked for me in one form or another or work with me.

And it was the middle of the day.

On a Friday? So who's free at 2 p .m. on a Friday to come and do stuff.

It was tiny and my best friend was getting married the next day, and I was his best man here in Texas.

So, my head's in a different place.

I'm thinking about the speech. I've just finished this episode.

I gotta go and work on the speech. I gotta remember the thing.

Don't do the joke about the white people.

And I come down and there's you know five people and they put a banner up and it said happy birthday and there was a cake and one of the guys was filming it, our videographer Max was filming it, and uh I was like ah this is really beautiful and then we sat down and we had some cakes.

It was all laid out really nicely.

Then they sang happy birthday to me and there was this bit, there was this sense as I went down as you said there about almost having this odd guilt debt that you want to repay to people because if they're doing this just because they love me, then I need to be able to feel that in a way, as opposed to there being some sort of value exchange.

All of these people in one form or another, work with me, work for me and that's fine, we're working together, we're building this project, we're doing the whatever thing.

And yeah, watching five people sing Happy Birthday to me at 2 .30 PM on a Friday, I did a live show in London last year to 3 and a half thousand people, the five people was way more uncomfortable.

Yeah, because I was seen by them.

But think of the world we've set up, Dr. Joyner, he's out of Florida State, he writes really eloquently on suicide.

One of the the the three legs of the stool is of when you're doing a suicide assessment is perceived burdensomeness.

There's that idea. People would be better if I wasn't here.

But look at the world we've built like I'm not gonna ask you to take me to the airport.

I'll just Uber. I'm not gonna ask you can I borrow some eggs and sugar.

I'm just gonna like instacart or whatever.

And I think the meta -narrative is, my presence is a burden too.

And if you guys are, it's the air we breathe, that everyone, I'm gonna bother people, and now every relationship we have is transactional.

And your experience is, man, it's very common that you wake up and the one people in your life are on your payroll, or on somebody's payroll, like you're on the same payroll.

And man... Phew. Your body would be failing you if it let you sleep all night because it knows you're lonely, right?

In some ways, I've heard you have people in your life that you can talk to that are just your friends that you don't work with, that seems to be a common thread in some of the conversations you speak to.

You have some housewife, I've heard you speak to a bunch of these recently, housewife who's, there was one that had insomnia, she kept waking up throughout the night.

Oh, yeah, yeah, that same thing, yeah.

You said how many friends have you got and you dug real deep, and it turned out she did have, it seemed like she had quite a good social network, But yes, it does seem we spend so much time at work and were so obsessed with productivity and moving forward in some way that we don't have friends for the sake of being friends with them.

We have friends who are compatriots and soldiers in whatever battle it is that we're fighting against getting our Brazilian jiu -jitsu purple belt, against becoming better at pickleball, against learning to salsa dance, against learning to do improv, against the job interview, the promotion, whatever it is.

And it's an odd blend.

It makes people into a 401K.

Is it your opinion that there is something lesser About friendship with people that you work with too?

No, the fear I have is when you don't have Jiu -Jitsu and you don't have, I remember dude training at MMA gym, dude.

That's the most eclectic, wacky group of people that had a shared mission that all got together.

You selected for a group that wanna be punched in the face.

Yeah but there's also like a male nurse person.

This guy doesn't have a job at all.

And this guy's a dean of students and it was a random group of people.

Um, no, the problem with only having friends at work is if something ever doesn't work out there, you find yourself on an island in a moment when you need people.

And so if you get let go, if you have a problem at work, then you also have a problem everywhere else in your life.

Well, it's the same issue with men who get divorced, right?

The single most predictive lifestyle change for suicide is men who get divorced.

The reason being, it seems, women are much better at holding on to their own social networks when they get into a marriage, whereas men supplant their own social networks and they use the wives.

So, you know, the wife has loads of female friends, and the female friends have husbands, and you, as the husband, become friends with the husbands of her.

That's it! That's it, man.

And you sit there, Like, yeah, it's hot, yeah.

Yeah, how's work, good.

The only thing you have in common is the fact that your wife knows their wife.

That's it. Yeah, and that's what - And then usually that is, y 'all have kids in the same age, and then when that kid moves up, yeah, the tether gets pulled on everything.

Yeah, yeah, it's that ability to be able to sit with, oh, well, people actually want to be here for this.

There's a degree of discomfort.

Not for this, for you.

And that's hard to hold.

James, you spoke about him earlier on the other half of mutonic.

I fucking love this story.

I tell it all the time but I fucking adore it.

He did a load of mushrooms. I won't mention the country in case they're gonna kick him out.

Did a load of mushrooms on a rock and this question came to him and the question was, do people love you for who you are or for what you do?

And people loving you for what you do feels transactional.

It feels flimsy, it feels volatile and the subtext is, if I stopped doing what I do, then the love would be taken away from me as well.

What we want is people to love us for who we are because it feels grounded and forever.

It's attached to our sense of self where our work isn't and it's rigid, right?

And I'd told this story on the pod and someone asked, it's an interesting question, but a more interesting question is, do you love you for who you are or for what you do?

Because a lot of the time, we want the world to love us for who we are, meanwhile we love us for what we do.

So you're asking the world to show up for you in a way that you're not prepared to show up for yourself.

You don't love you for who you are, for the fact that you actually care about other people, that you have empathy, that yeah, sure it looks a little bit wimpy when you cry at Christmas films, but it's because you've got a soft side to you, or because you're really reliable like genuine good traits that are as timeless as you can be.

No, no, no, you've judged yourself on the last 10 hours of productivity and the fact that you got distracted on YouTube for 30 minutes, despite the fact that you've crushed it, even if you look at your productivity over the last six months, you've crushed it as well.

But no, no, no, you know exactly where your shortcomings lie and the scabs that you can pick at and the scars, and you know exactly what to say to yourself to torture yourself about these things, and you're not a nice friend to you.

But you want the world to be a nice friend to you.

You want the world to love you for who you are.

Meanwhile, you love you for what you do.

I just thought that was such a lovely little.

No, I think it's, cut me off if you heard me talk about this, it was after book number two comes out.

So I grew up in a house, we didn't have a lot, right, and money was electric.

It was always a sense of tension.

Always, always, always, always.

And the book comes out, my wife and I, she was raised by teachers, my dad was a policeman and then he became a minister.

So, we - A lot of authority.

My therapist, when I walked in, I was like, my dad's a competent minister, she was like getting the lake out.

It's very happy. We've got lots of work.

Very happy, um, but both of us come with not a lot, right?

And so then you find yourself in this wild new world, right, where, of abundance, don't have psychology for it.

I'm downstairs, my family has called me, they've been with maybe 7 to 10 days, too long, and they know it, I know it, it's that strange, like, it'd be good if y 'all left, and they're like, would be good if we left, and it's that awkward. They leave, I've got COVID as they're leaving and then I'm working out in the gym in my basement.

My manager calls and he says, hey, you know those two speaking event gigs we were hoping to land, you got a second, and the way he called I was like, oh man, we didn't get it.

He calls and starts yelling into the phone.

We got him! And I start yelling, because these were the last two, like, transformational, financially for me.

And I start cheering.

I start yelling. Yeah!

My wife comes downstairs into the basement.

She's like, what are you yelling about?

And I was like, we got him!

I'm going to the speak of this thing, this thing.

And she's a very stoic, West Texas woman.

Like, just, we'll withdraw and wait until things are calm.

She didn't do that.

She came forward this time she got this close, which is not how she does conflict, and she said, I'm watching my husband die and I'm watching him cheer the whole way, and I'm gaunt, I'm exhausted, I'm sweaty, I'm sick, I'm peopled out and I'm cheering.

And then she said this, she said, the pie chart of how much I love you and the pie piece for how much money you make is full.

And then she said, we have enough.

And she turned and walked away.

And I angrily was like, what the hell's enough?

And it was like, oh, I'll get you for it.

And I didn't understand, what does that mean when someone just says, no, no, no. I picked you, the joke in our house is she bought real low on me, right?

Like she bought when the stock was really low on me.

She's like, I picked you and this is cool, this is awesome.

But I picked you. And at part of the exchange, she was like, you can go do your speaking events.

I told you when I married you I'd never tell you.

No, go do it. This is for your ego, this is not for us.

And I got hot, but then I have, I went straight to the therapist's office, but we ended up in this moment.

She said, I want you to take your fist and put it in your chest and say the words to me, I love this man.

And that was the first time I was like, oh, I'm over my head, I'm stuck.

I couldn't say the word, I couldn't do that act.

And in front of another grown woman, I could not say, I love this guy.

And then I was like, I got a problem, right.

I'm asking the world to give me something that I won't honor myself to give myself.

It's tough, it's tough.

How did you work through that?

Very, very slowly, very slowly.

Yeah, it sounds obscene to think I've gotta practice, but I have to practice saying, you're a good dad.

Yeah, this sounds cheesy, I carry this with me.

This is a, like, when the thoughts pop in, like, ah, your kids would be better off if you were at home right now.

No, they wouldn't, they're doing great, right?

it's that negative self -talk and just resetting that.

So you're doing some CBT homework?

That's exactly right.

Or ACT, ACT, yeah. I've started CBT this year.

And I did a twice weekly psychotherapy for a year.

Okay. And— How was that?

Tough. Okay. Actually in retrospect, it wasn't so tough at the time.

I loved it. My therapist was amazing.

It taught me an awful lot about myself.

It taught me more about myself than one and a half thousand sessions of meditation.

and many many years of journaling because somebody else is pointing at the things that you've got that are going on inside of your mind.

But it opens an awful lot of loops that it doesn't close.

Cuz there's no action steps.

Yeah, that's exactly right, yeah.

Correct. And maybe for some people who aren't as dopamine norepinephrine -y as me, that's fine because they can just sit in the story, but if I've got open loops, I'm gonna try and fix them and I think that this is, there's lots of different modalities where people can improve of their mental health, where people can improve the quality of their life.

Your outcomes may vary, as they say in trading or whatever it is, and I think psychotherapy is really, really useful for learning about yourself, but you need something which is more action focused.

So for me, CBT's been fascinating, it's been very rewarding, but fuck, dude, it's hard, because for the people that don't know, cognitive behavioral therapy is basically one hour a week where you speak to a guy, and then the remaining, whatever it is, 163 hours a week where you do homework.

Challenge the thoughts, yeah.

You do homework. He gives you homework and it's not, if you looked at the reminders in my phone, you'd think I was a crazy person.

I've got like punch the bully.

It repeats every three hours throughout the day.

Journaling practice, anyway.

It's been really interesting.

But talking about, I didn't find that as useful.

CBT is obviously, it's the gold standard. I found the act the app acceptance a commitment instead of challenging the thoughts so much. It's letting him walk by Or letting him be that guy at the table that always you know always know that guy everybody has that friend and I you spoke And I appreciate it.

I'm gonna move on that's interesting and that it keeps me from going to war with myself Mmm, otherwise I stay in I stay in constant conflict with myself and that gets exhausting for me before we continue Do you often feel sluggish foggy go crampy throughout the day?

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I wrote this the other day it kind of, I think it resonates a little bit with what you're talking about there.

Some advice on how to support men.

Men want to aim high without feeling insufficient if they fall short.

Men want their suffering to be recognized and appreciated without being pandered to or patronized and made to feel weak.

Men want to believe that they can become more without feeling like they're not enough already.

Men want to be able to open up without being judged.

Men want support without feeling broken.

Men want to be loved for who they are, not for what they do.

Too Long didn't read.

Blending inspiration with compassion is not an easy task.

How do I set lofty goals which drive me to fulfill my potential without feeling less than if I don't get there tomorrow said every guy ever.

The desire for self -love and high performance comes into conflict inside of the mind of everyone, men especially.

Sure, some men are all drive and goals with non -introspection.

And sure, some men are all reflection in inner work with few external desires.

But most men desire a mix of encouraged self belief and understanding support.

Inevitably, these two things come into conflict.

Basically, every man just wants to hear I know you can be more.

But you are enough already.

And even if you just stay where you are, I'll be right here next to you.

You're going to be great, but you don't need to be great.

And I'm with you no matter what.

Or as said best by Sturgill Simpson's mom, boy, I don't care if you hit it big, because you're already number one.

Hmm. Yeah, that's powerful.

And that reminds me of what your wife said.

Yeah. You know? Like, this is all great.

But it also throws into harsh contrast, why am I doing it?

If people love me for who I am, why am I doing what I do?

Yeah. Well, if you're doing it because you think it's gonna feel some way on the back end, that's the tale of all this time, right?

That's the great, that's the Jim Carrey speech, right?

I wish everyone could become rich and famous and it's not going to fix the problem.

Yeah, it's nonsense.

And I think the alternative that we've got in the last 15 -20 years is, well, I'm just going to opt out and play video games.

And that's a recipe for disaster too.

I think we—you know, Michael Easter's book, The Comfort Christ, which I think is a masterpiece—I think we have a culture that's allergic to discomfort.

And so, I think that tension is—that's where joy is.

That's where meaning is, is I'm enough and I can hold that loosely enough so that I can hit that guy real hard. They added a breakdown on ESPN the other day of Alex Piera, and his, they're talking about how hard he hits, that it's otherworldly.

And they had interview with the referees, like the sound it makes when he hits another human is different, right?

And I just thought, man, can you imagine me all do that?

But they say it comes from how calm he is, right?

His ability to stay at until he uncorks.

And my coach used to always say, dude, you're like a bear.

You're so tense all the time and it takes away.

And so I think if men knew, oh, she loves me no matter what, it actually drives that anchor deep into the concrete so you can repel off the edge and go do something bananas.

And it sounds counterintuitive.

Yeah, that you don't need to push me.

I'll push myself more if I know that I don't need to.

Let me know I'm anchored.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well I mean that's a phenomenal piece of advice.

And I put that essay out, and perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of women who caught a hold of it or follow me on Instagram said, women want this too.

And I'm like, yeah, I'm sure they do.

Can I tell you, that drives me crazy.

That makes me insane, dude.

Every conversation has to be so universal at all times.

You've got to equivocate.

God almighty. If I write a note on Instagram to dads...

What about moms? I guess.

Moms too. But I was, I failed as a dad at this moment.

I just wrote myself a note.

You'll notice that it doesn't really happen in the other direction.

God almighty, dude.

It's wild. It's wild.

I had a conversation with Richard Reeves sat here Gosh, what Richard?

Oh my gosh. Yes the Boyson men Yeah So he's great, the American Institute of Boyson men and It was the second time we'd been on and we got we went for like three and a half hours.

It was phenomenal and I mentioned I was getting a bit frustrated At the fact that every time I talk about the problems facing Boyson men I need to do this weird social -land acknowledgment about the fact, well, we must recognize that there is issues that women have faced and we have to remember that it's only been a recent time that men have been falling behind and we must not forget the fact that we've got other sexual assaults, blah, blah, blah.

And after we've gone through all of that, let's begin to talk about men.

It's the Seinfeld. Not that there's anything wrong with that, right?

Everything has to have a qualifier.

And I'm like, can I say this once at the beginning of my career and never have to say it again?

Because part of it's clipping culture that if somebody's able to pull you out of context by not having said the thing, and even if you do, if you say it at the beginning, this happened to me the other day, I said the thing, I said it, and it just got cut off.

I'm like, right, well, fuck it, I might as well not even say it.

But what about this?

What if as a society we just chose I'm gonna think the best of Chris.

One of the problems is.

God almighty. We don't like to think the best of people because hypocrisy on the internet is like catnip, right?

Being able to catch somebody out, This was the reason.

You remember when Joe popped for his N word video, uh, which is like five minutes of you hard, uh, actually hard R your way through stuff, a combination of A -ing and hard R -ing.

Anyway, um, this video goes live and, uh, Joe's like, yeah, fuck that looks bad.

That's that's, that's not, that's not good.

And the internet was told by legacy media.

This is what this guy is truly like.

And this is what it means about him.

He's really the secret, bigoted, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, transphobic, etc, that we've always known he was.

They were saying, this is the tip of the iceberg, and we know that below it is all of this.

But the problem was, most of the people that were trying to convince her, like, I've listened to 500 hours of him speaking, you're saying that this is the tip of the iceberg, I've seen the whole iceberg.

I know there's nothing down there, or I have a reliable sense that there isn't anything down there.

And that situation kind of taught me what gets sucked in, what causes people to get sucked in to this.

And the precise thing is a vacuum of information and there's speculation, the opportunity for people to point a finger and say, see, I got him, I got him.

And the principle of charity is not extended to people on the internet.

But it's not extended to people in our homes.

Like the Gottman say, when you distill all the way down, what makes a great marriage beyond all religion, and finding, are y 'all friends?

Like I've got a buddy who lives what, five hours west of here.

His name's John To.

He was Fat John and I was Hyper John and back in the day, dude would always leave cans out everywhere.

Always, always, always, always.

The single worst text responder in human history.

It doesn't matter. A guy cannot respond to a text.

It's phenomenal. Not one time have I ever left his house and thought, leaving cans out.

what is he trying to say about our friendship?

Not one time. He doesn't respond.

Not one time have I thought, does he not love me?

What does this mean for us?

Not once, he's my friend.

A guy stood in front of me and throwing punches on my behalf, literally.

He's opened up his house to me for decades.

He's my friend. But I don't give my wife, what do these towels mean?

Or like, what is happening in this house?

Oh, there's a dish in the dishwasher.

What is she trying to tell me?

And we make this huge character assassination.

It's madness. I think what's happening on the internet is a magnification of what happens in our own homes.

We're so unsure of ourselves, we walk around with these glasses on trying to find where everybody else has holes so we can be like, yep, yep, yep, yep.

And that's the way we try to prop ourselves up to say, I've got value too, right?

I can get value by burning everybody to the ground inside my own house.

Our self -worth stands on the shoulders of other people's shortcomings.

That's it. That's it.

Instead of exhaling and saying, when I walk in the door and there's a pile of towels, good God, what must have her day been like.

Let's pick up the towels.

Or when I walk into John's house, I just pick up the cans.

Or when he finally texts me back, right?

Like, hey, what's up?

Like, yeah, I'm happy to hear from him, man.

He's one of my best friends.

So it's a madness. It's a madness.

Speaking about challenges, why do you think people regularly get into relationships with partners they feel like they need to fix?

Yeah I think that old that old adage in marriage therapy is true, you marry your unfinished business.

I think the way I would describe it is your nervous system puts little GPS pins in there when you're a kid and you're constantly asking, why doesn't that man love me?

He's supposed to? Or why is this shiny little box more important than me?

Or why did my mom pick up that bottle of wine and not pick up me?

And you constantly trying to solve that loop and man you get older and you want to your body repeats what it knows and you go in and trust all that situation again you do it again I was just talking to somebody in the outside of the grocery store there they are just a minute ago about the same exact thing your body just goes in tries to solve it again and solve it again and you got to get outside that loop otherwise you just repeat it and you repeat it and you repeat it because over time you realize the seven -year -olds not the problem seven is never the problem.

Well, I suppose you can become enchanted by a person that you're attached to.

Yeah. Which fills a literal void inside of you.

And when this is a primary caretaker, this is good, but when this is an inappropriate partner, it's not.

So you're used to...

I think a lot of the time, if you grow up around difficult adults, children can't change or get rid of that caregivers, so they just learn to cope.

They learn to solve it.

Yeah, they learned to hold on to long enough in the hopes that maybe the person will take mercy on them and change.

If you're five, you don't have a passport, you don't know how to leave the house.

So you become, if you were not cared for in the way that you should, as a child, you learned to become unusually good at surviving on a meager diet of love.

Or you learned to sing and dance and get it.

Right? I've got to perform.

I remember one of the coolest things about going back to grad school as an old man is I had to do a practicum again.

And I was working with this brilliant man named a psychologist named Dr. Michael Gomez.

And I remember we were sitting with these kids that had some pretty remarkable trauma.

And one of the kids was making straight A's.

And during a debrief, I said, he's like, all right, who's going to struggle here?

Where do we go? And I said, this one's going to be okay.

And I said, why? And he goes, well, he's performing well, he's doing, he's making great grades." And he said something that has rattled me since, he said, straight A's can be a trauma response too John.

And you can burn a building down, kids will find a way to be seen or they'll find a way to hide, they'll find a way to stay safe.

And they'll nuzzle up against you so I think kids are always trying to solve.

And yeah, there's some that have to survive on just sips of oxygen right, through a straw, but others will be really good on that tee ball field, man.

Because that makes my dad exhale.

Well, I mean, that's why when we look at, you know, the highest performers in business and content creation output and the world of sports and all the rest of it, for the most part, what you should look at these people with is pity, not envy.

You think what has happened to this person to cause them to need to do that to themselves.

That's not for me to say that all high performers don't have, Sure.

Some don't have a good balance of you desire for more and running away from past trauma and all the rest of this stuff.

Many do. But most don't.

Most are doing it because they need validation from the world because they didn't get it when they were a kid.

Yeah. I remember watching that ESPN documentary with Michael Jordan.

And there's that scene where he's smoking the cigar in the hotel room and he looks at the camera and he said you don't want this life and he can't go to the bathroom downstairs.

Like there's just full of people, right?

And I remember it cuts to a scene of the banders and the rafters.

And again, I'm sitting there on my couch in my small little house, and I just remember looking at all that saying, for what?

Like for six pieces of cloth?

For glory? Like, for what?

Right? It's a weird realization, though, especially when it comes to high performers, because we assume that if we had what they had, we would feel fulfilled.

And the reason that they're not fulfilled is because they're ungrateful, not because the fulfillment is hollow.

That's exactly right.

issue is with them, not with the thing that they've been given the fuel.

That's right. And dude, I'm doing the same thing.

The moment my first book went number one, I was in a meeting two weeks later, be like, all right, what's the next one?

I got right on it, man.

Dude, it just taps in, man.

We both do need to act.

But yeah, I think there's a lot of different insights on the dating somebody that's a problem thing.

I think there's an allure of somebody who doesn't love us back.

There's an allure of someone.

but the allure is a question why can I solve this can I solve this?

Of course! Because a lot of us like fixing problems because we but we also export our value to somebody else.

Oh yeah right and if this person doesn't like me, can I morph and change and transform so that I can become likeable?

If we can convince someone who doesn't seem to like us all the time to care maybe that means that we're worthy.

That's right right we solved the problem.

Of course. If we can fix them as well, maybe it means that we're fixable too.

In their mistreatment of us, we see reflected the same level of mistreatment that we give ourselves.

I actually always did think that I wasn't worthy of love and now it's being given to me, and if I can redeem this person externally, maybe it means that I can fix what it is that I've proven to myself into as well.

I think, you know, the weirdest element of this that I was thinking about was variable schedule reward. So the way that slot machines work, and just that, when you see someone that's in a crazy relationship, turbulent, it's hot, and it's cold, and it's all the rest of it, you think, what the fuck is, like, what are the both of these people getting from this relationship?

And I get the sense that there's just, you don't know what you're going to wake up to today.

It's like, don't know what you're going to wake up to today that might be really painful, but there's just a very, very ancient bit of your brain that fucking loves it.

Exactly. Well, and we've, uh, I actually came to her book through you.

Uh, Louise Perry's book.

She's on again this week.

Um, there's a, uh, quote in that book that has just bounced around and said my head is haunting me, but it's about, have we solved for so many existential issues that plague and humanity forever, that we're simply, we're bored to death.

Oh, I think this is the exact, Maslow's hierarchy of needs thing.

But I have a, man, I have an unsubstantiated hypothesis about you and that Maslow's hierarchy we can talk about.

All right. But I think we're, I think we're bored to death.

I think our brains are cooking, because we've got food at the touch of a button.

We got water in every room in our house.

We've got these problems solved.

And then it's got, we need that slot machine man.

And we'll get it from that guy who may expect me not may, may, may.

You know the idea of concept creep?

Where as the incident of something like let's say racism becomes less and less over time, the definition of racism expands, the level of racism stays the same.

But what constitutes racism has changed in order to keep the level the same because the actual incidents have reduced.

in the same way as I think climate related deaths have decreased by fifty times.

It's like 98 -percent drop in the last hundred years, let's say something like that.

168 ,000 people get lifted out of poverty every single day, so we've had to redefine what climate crisis means.

And that's not to say that there isn't a fucking problem with the climate but when it comes to in your life, if you're the sort of person who is used to fixing problems and you don't have many problems anymore, you'll begin inventing them.

You will begin finding them in places where they don't need to be, not because you are a good problem finder, but because you're addicted to solving problems. Yeah, and my identity is found, and I solve problems. And I will manufacture them, and I will create them and I will seek them out.

And my wife will often...she'll gently pat the table or pat my leg when I get off into...

Syria the interest we're right here and it's such a such a like okay yeah I can solve this one tonight I can be nicer to my daughter right now yeah I think on the difficult partners thing if you don't have a full tank of self -love how dare you deny the love of somebody else even if it's tricky or filled with poisonous ingredients.

You know what I mean?

I have, I don't think of myself that highly and this person isn't treating me that highly either but they're treating me.

And it sounds like a cliche thing that I'm always, nobody's gonna exercise.

Nobody's going to go through the pain of any sort of life change or any sort of relationship change.

If at the end of the day, you don't think you're worth the change, right?

And so it's easy to keep going out and seeking these nonsensical lack of reality, like truths that exist in our world now, because I don't even think I'm worth doing the hard work.

Dave Ramsey's built an empire on live on less than you make.

And it's like, that's insane.

It's madness. It's just math, dude.

But we create all these other alternate realities to make ourselves go, because I don't even think I'm worth the hard math.

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Modern wisdom. Yeah.

I mean, look, we accept the love that we think we deserve.

There you go. And, and that's the problem.

Yeah. Because this is why you see people who are consistently in the same sorts of relationships.

It's intellectual cutting.

It's intellectual self -harm.

Oh, right. I got it.

I'm not worth it. Yeah.

I've got it. I've whipped myself into submission.

I wanna ask you, can we pontificate?

Fire away. I've been wrestling with Maslow's hierarchy.

Once you get above physiology and love, I don't know that this idea of esteem and self -actualization can co -exist on top of these things.

I think they are inner woven.

And I think that we may have, um, given ourself an illusion that you, you, you become actualized as you're choosing to love every day, despite hard things and how to forgive.

and you find esteem by consistently being part of safety and consistently being part of a community and coming back in when you get separated.

And this idea that they're separate and somehow we're all going to become this little lighthouse on a hill.

I think we're at the end of self -actualization.

This notion that we can somehow all be little lighthouses on a hill.

I don't think this is how we're wired and designed.

I certainly think it's more difficult in the modern world because, let's face it, the safety needs, the basic needs, the survival needs, they're looked after.

You don't have to do anything for them.

So all of those needs now, for instance, good example, you're not going to starve.

Most people listening to this podcast, I would like to think aren't going to starve, but that doesn't mean that someone is going to cook a meal and put it on your dinner table.

So there's a difference between having food in the house so that the people around you don't starve and serving them through something which they still need, right?

Is that what you're talking about, sort of a relationship between the two?

Well, I think implied, especially in the modern world, is— and again, I don't know what Maslow was thinking— but there's absent participation in these bottom wrongs.

There's an expectation that they're going to exist for us so that I can get to the more important stuff of sitting in a room and thinking about how great I am or painting a picture.

Whole Foods has got that sorted, the police have got safety sorted.

Yeah, yeah, so the world owes me these things.

The world owes me love.

The world owes me these things so that I can get to the more important stuff which is on top.

And I think that's false.

I think the more important stuff I will find out I'll become actualized through a constant lifetime of love.

Well, there's definitely an element that anyone going through an existential crisis, anyone asking themselves, am I really enacting my logos forward?

Is this my highest contribution to the world?

is in a position of ultimate luxury.

That's it. Because the only chance that you have to ask yourself that question.

But it diminishes the mom who day in and day out and day in and day out and day in and day out, that's self -actualization.

Dude, I wanna make moms great again.

The dad who dude doesn't do the job that we do.

He goes up and down Fifth and Sixth Street collecting trash day after day after day, year after year after year.

You don't do that and then hopefully they can get some self -actualization on the side.

You're gonna look back and say, this city operated because I was a part of it.

That's self -actualization, right?

It's not this place you go to, this destination that you're removed from, these other things, they're tightly integrated.

Yeah, that's interesting.

But you know, I mean, how many people do you know that have reached some degree of success?

Two people that I think of, Tucker Max and Ryan Holiday, both of whom live in opposite directions out here from Austin, two people who, big businesses, very successful authors, well -known, renowned, money, opportunities, blah, blah, blah—essentially retired to do the thing that they used to do full -time, part -time, and to hammer fence posts in full -time.

Like in the ranching and wrangling and fucking hoeing the ground and fixing fence posts and the sheep's got stuck and blah, blah, blah.

Well, why? Because chopping wood and carrying water actually gives you a sense of satisfaction that it's hard to find elsewhere.

I've been thinking an awful lot about where people take joy and satisfaction from in their work and for people who maybe have a little bit of agency or self determination to the sort of work that they do, who need to be a business owner, but they can maybe contribute to how the teams are put together.

Maybe part of a small business or a startup or maybe they are independent contractor or something like that.

I've been thinking a lot about bands and the way that bands have to work very hard, but It's a very enjoyable career and performing and concerts rank as some of the highest happiness pursuits that you can do.

Like huge, huge, huge studies that look at anything that's collective effervescence, especially if you're performing but also if you're experiencing.

You have to presume that if you're performing, you also get the benefit of experiencing at the same time.

And I was thinking like, okay, so what is it that they're doing that's keeping them going when they're 50 -dates deep into this big long tour and they're in fucking Japan, and they're sleep deprived, blah, blah, blah.

And I think a big part of it is having other people to share the successes with to be able to, and I don't just mean like coming home to your wife and her going, no, I think good for you, honey, or whatever it might be, but a good thing happens and you have someone that you can go, that's fucking sick, you know what I mean?

Like, and it wasn't your wife in that moment, but it was your manager, right?

You on the phone to your manager, your manager's there screaming down the phone because you're both on a journey together.

That's right. If you'd done your own buckings, who would you have screamed to?

Yeah, I would have pumped my fist and been like, cool.

And forgotten about it, it's got this memory.

You wouldn't have remembered it if it was on your own.

That's right. You wouldn't have remembered it.

Yeah. And then having my wife walk up at one of those events.

She surprised me, walked up with a microphone and said, I'm so proud of you.

I'll remember that till the day I die, right.

I'll remember that till the day I die.

Yeah, because it meant something.

It was a shared experience.

And kind of like stand -up comedy, I've become obsessed over the last few years, man.

I'm just obsessed. I live around the corner from a club in Nashville and I kind of go too much, I love it.

But that N music, it's got a pretty tight feedback loop to it.

Exactly I mean you have immediate response from the audience.

It's one of the last bastions of human connection.

Yeah you play a good note, they make a noise, you tell a good joke, they make a noise, it's very quick.

So yeah I think just one thing that's come to me, although the internet and remote working have afforded everybody the opportunity to step back and to you know I can work from anywhere man you know I can be on the top of a mountain I can determine my and working schedule, I don't need anybody else, I just need a laptop and an Internet connection, I'm good.

That's great, but it's siloed you off from being able to do the thing that you actually wanted to do, which was enjoy the fucking process of getting the work.

Some people are just looking to earn in pounds and spend in pesos, and they have whatever, like fulfillment that occurs outside of their job, fine.

But if you want to get some fulfillment from your job, I don't think that you can solo Sigma male loan ranger wantrepreneur in fucking Bali because when you nail this next client on a sales call for like the biggest deal you've ever, oh my god, like Hewlett Packard are gonna use our software.

Dude, you just made 20 grand, you just made 20 grand.

Oh, it's just me that made 20 grand.

Who am I gonna celebrate with?

And I'm fired up, kind of, but I'm not that fired up because the whole reason that you want to win something is so that you can go, ah, with other people.

That's the wolf of Wall Street, DiCaprio's character.

It looks like he's addicted to the deal.

I don't think he was.

I think he was addicted to the room cheering.

You know what I mean?

To that celebration.

And the deal gets you that, right?

Yes, yes, so that becomes the proxy.

And all the money is is just the number that you get to like, shout in the air with everybody else.

That's it, that's it.

And the awe and the, oh my gosh, how did you do that?

That's amazing. So a perfect example of this, I'm gonna go and do, it looks like, it's the first time I'm talking about it.

I'm gonna go and do a tour around America and Canada.

Outstanding. Later this year.

Come to Nashville please.

It's booked. Is it?

Oh yeah. Outstanding.

So as a part of that, I'm gonna get to...

I don't need a warmup, right?

It's two hours of me talking on stage.

I'm gonna take a warmup.

Because I want someone to finish the show with and fucking high five, and it might be Zack, my ex housemate, who plays guitar.

It might be James Smith from Australia.

It might be somebody.

I might get, you know, guests come and do one, but I want someone there with me So that I don't go back to the hotel on my own and think about how good or how bad it was You know what?

I mean? Like I've got friends who are DJs dude.

I've got friends DJing looks from the outside like the most dialed life in the world.

Let me tell you it is On the come up before you've got your tour manager with you before you've got an opener with you before you've got like a structure around you it's Kind of a bit like hell you're playing until three in the morning, if you've got back -to -back gigs, I have a friend who did, played a gig on a Monday in Argentina, Buenos Aires or something, and the next time he got to sleep in a bed was Saturday, so it was Monday to Saturday, he played four gigs over five time zones, or whatever it was, and he ended up basically having a small psychotic break, talked about it on the podcast,

years ago now. He came to in a supermarket, sat on the floor, and he had laid around him one of every different type of hair product and he'd been scooping it up and putting it on his head because he realized his hair was shit.

He grabbed a floret of broccoli 48 dishwasher tablets and walked out.

Like you had a full, you know part psychotic break, and you think huh, that doesn't sound fun, but from the outside, oh my God, he's living his dream, he gets to play his music around the world.

Careful what you wish for.

Comes at a cost, man, yeah.

Especially on your own.

Yeah, there's always a trait, there's always a trait.

Talking about the next step, people get into relationships with those that they feel like they need to fix.

Why do people stay in relationships even if they're not being fulfilled?

Hmm... Talk to me about fulfillment.

And I think sometimes that's the model you have. I think sometimes I'm not worth my needs being fulfilled.

Sometimes I don't even know what that would feel like if my needs were fulfilled.

And so kind of you talked about earlier, I'm just going to keep expanding what my needs need to be, because my need is actually seeing you how high you can jump.

And it just keeps expanding, expanding.

But I think for most of us we don't have a model of what it looks like.

Our moms and dads, if you look at the demographics across, like there was only one parent in the house or they were co -managers of the house, didn't even like each other, right?

And I've got no picture of what someone who actually loves me and is connected with me and quote unquote needs And by the way, I've been struggling lately, and love to get your thoughts on this, I've been struggling with the idea of needs because I think needs have turned modern relationships into a very parasitic relationship.

And I think beneath that, a more vulnerable, scary question to ask is what I want.

And I think it's easy if I lob a need grenade at you, I need you to do these things, this, this, this, this, and this, versus, man I really want you to X, Y, and Z.

because one of those I kind of take out the I need this and if you don't do this and then you're not performing or I really want you do you want me to do you see me oh that's lovely and so I think most of us are so terrified at asking the one question of ourselves and of our partner that we cast it all as needs right because the want can be denied it's right but the need can't most one should could be denied but the need shouldn't if you deny my needs you're an If you deny my wants..." Because you might not want it.

That's different. One of the most common questions I get from married men is, I just want her...

I just want more sex, right?

I want more sex, I want better sex, etc. But they come at it with, I need more sex, but if you need something, then it goes on the chore list. Along with the diapers and of this and I got to clean the kitchen.

Which is unbelievably sexy.

I'll get you off and then I'm gonna go to bed, right?

A way more terrifying question for a modern male is, to a wife with two kids, and it's exhausting and you're both working full -time?

I want you, do you want me?

And if you don't, we need to have that conversation.

What would desire look like?

That's a scarier conversation, man.

And there are basic needs, so I don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

But I think most of this comes down to want.

That's terrifying. That's an awesome reframe.

That's really good.

Yeah, I think in the process of defining our wants and risking the potential for somebody to be unprepared to fulfill them for us, we feel less than.

Or we don't have a psychology for being wrong.

I think you've talked about this on another show that I listened to.

Before I went to college, I went to this very well -meaning Texas church camp, and they took us 18 -year -old guys in a room and they were like, the world's gonna destroy you.

So, write down right now what your non -negotiables for your life partner will be.

Write them down right now, because they're going to get watered down and the edges rubbed off it's going to be bad.

Oh, okay. So you were sort of at this purist...

Yeah, before the world soils you, write down you're ten non -negotiables.

I'm twenty -six years with the same person, the same woman, and I think she had two of the ten and one of them was be a pretty girl, right.

Like, be a beautiful woman.

And so, when I say I want something, so often my managers, that's his job.

It's to be like, you don't want that.

Like, I really want this, you don't want that, right.

And we don't have a psychology for being wrong.

We just are so let around the nose by our feelings.

I feel, I feel, I feel, I feel.

And man, I can get what I want when I cast it in the form of a need.

You have to meet it.

That's fascinating.

I suppose as well, it goes back to what do you think you deserve?

and if We don't have a Man, if you had to fight, and scratch, and claw and sing and dance in a third -grade math class to get your mom to look you in the eye You don't think you're worthy of a want You know what I mean?

If you had to sing and dance on a soccer field for your dad to pat you on the back No eye contact, of course, just pat you on the back You don't think you You know, you're not worthy of wanting anything Everything has to be in need Well also, what was the model of needs and wants and desires being requested and fulfilled in the household?

Because a lot of the generation that are growing up now and are asking themselves these questions, their parents, they didn't have that sort of communication education, there wasn't podcasts and fucking Arthur Brooks and all of this stuff to help everybody through.

So you go, okay, well, what was the model of how to communicate the things?

well what about like passive aggression?

That's it. What about shadow sentences?

What about not requesting what you need and then getting bitter about the fact that you never got it?

Yeah, we were cast in movies.

We didn't even know we were in and we got in trouble for not knowing the lines, right?

Right. Yeah. Yeah, you didn't attend the party, you weren't invited.

Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah and then how dare you not show up?

Yep. Right, yeah. Yep, and you don't know.

So yeah I think the sense of what are you worth?

what are you worth, what should you get out of this?

And do you even know what it is that you're asking for?

Have you got an idea of it?

And I guess, okay, moving one step forward from this, if somebody feels convinced that they should leave a relationship but they're struggling to accumulate the bravery, to be able to sort of pull the pin, maybe they've got close a few times and they've bailed out, what would you say to sort of motivate that person who, deep down, knows that it's the right thing to do, but as of yet, just the courage kind of hasn't come to them.

Yeah, that's a great question.

I think, I think there's a practical aspect to this, and then I think there's a relational aspect to this.

If there's a very real, the data is pretty clear that, you know, more women file for divorce, but women's net worth often plummets, right?

And so there's a very real economic consequence.

So if you're married to somebody, if you're living with somebody and you know, I got to get out of this thing, there's a very real math problem you have to solve.

And that's unfortunate, and that's scary, and the social services are pretty tough, but there's a very real question.

Suppose that the equivalent would be the same for men, but in reverse, paying alimony, and blah, blah.

That's exactly right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I think there's a math problem there.

Not to say stay together for the math, right?

I haven't seen that bumper sticker, but there's a very real reality to this.

The other side of it is, I know for most of us, when emotions are a sign, especially strong emotions, are a sign that your body's trying to protect you.

And when your body's trying to protect you, you're not thinking.

And so for me, it's been very important to have a couple of men in my life that I outsource some of these things to.

Let's sit down with you, make sure I'm seeing this thing clearly.

Because here's what I'm feeling.

And it's been more than once in my life when I sit down with a few of my old 30 -year -plus, ride -or -die buddies, and I'm like, she's doing this and this and this.

And they're like, have you looked in a mirror, man?

And they're able to see something.

right no no warrior goes into battle without eyes in the sky and so I think I often or in our in our lone Ranger cowboy world we live in man it's you gotta know all this but I'll do those by yourself and so I'm constantly telling people to go get a cup of coffee with somebody and just exhale then tell me what's going on and they may say hey there's a common thing on my show someone will call and be like my sex life screwed up we have only had sex twice last year it's a disaster it's falling apart and then 10 minutes into of the conversation, it's like, well, we have a five -year -old, a three -year

-old, a one -year -old, and she's pregnant.

I'm like, bro, hang up the phone, call me back.

Like, you'll have survival sex, you all are figuring this thing out, like you're not broke and it's okay, right?

But that's just, you just need somebody to sit with you.

But when it comes to courage and bravery, I think at some point we have to head into the discomfort.

I mean, that's all the, that's all Judd Brewer stuff on anxiety, but you've got to head into it, the thing that you're scared about and anxious about.

We'll get back to talking to Jon in just one minute.

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Yeah, I think some of the questions that I've asked friends about when they've been on the fence, unsure, scared about being alone, about losing this attachment.

And one of the things is how much of your life is thinking about this break -up taking up?

Like what other productive or peaceful or mindful thoughts is this taking the space of?

How often are you not present at dinner or not present at work or trying to meditate or train in the gym or do any of the things that usually bring you joy and you're not thinking about where you are?

And um. That's one of my, when someone says, hey, should I break up with them, I'm thinking about this, this.

I always say, absolutely you should break up with them.

And I just watch. And if their, if their shoulders drop, if their face drops, that may be the right move.

Yeah, because they've got a sense of relief.

Like, no, no, no, no. Yeah, they've got a sense of relief from that being on the other side.

They're just asking you for permission.

That's right. They're just asking you for permission.

There's this great, you know Rick Hansen, he wrote Hardwiring Happiness?

Dude, unreal. Imagine CBT meets Dharma wisdom, meets mindfulness, meets neuroscience.

It's Hardwiring Happiness by Rick Hansen.

He's got a phenomenal, phenomenal podcast with his son Forrest Hansen, I think it's called Being Well.

And he dropped this quote that said, Wisdom is choosing a greater happiness over a lesser happiness.

And I think, you know, a lot of the time we assume that change is only ever going to make things worse, even though when we look back almost all changes have made things better.

But we don't fear change.

We fear loss. True, yeah.

But that's uncertainty.

We don't necessarily feel loss.

We fear uncertainty.

That's right, yeah.

Because losing an abusive partner you re not fearing that, you re fearing the uncertainty of what it would be like to be without them.

We have two needs as humans.

We have an exploration need and we have a security need.

Right. Their intention, right.

Correct. Novelty. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Novelty, safety. You need to go out and get some berries.

You need to go to a new bush because this one s empty.

But also there s a risk of going there because there might be a line behind it and it might kill you.

I think one of the things that s really useful is to try and have faith that you are the sort of person who can handle change well.

Like, just to think about that as an ideal, like, it makes a world inside of your mind where you don't need to fear things adjusting, because change has happened in the past, and you seem to deal with it quite well then, change is going to happen in the future, you're probably going to deal with that.

So why not this one?

Like, why not back yourself to be able to be the sort of person who can deal with change well.

Like you've got this, you're flexible and you're ok in different situations, and unfortunately a lot of the people who have the opportunity to choose partners to not just have to settle for the first thing that happens, to have different life opportunities, to move away from their talent.

They are probably quite hard workers.

And the problem with being a hard worker is that you have to have a pain tolerance, and And if your pain tolerance is quite high, that means that your pain tolerance of emotional deprivation is quite high, which means that you'll stick about in a relationship that isn't serving you for a very, very long time.

Oh, just keep going and going and going and going, because that's what we do.

Yeah. You're used to putting your nose against the grindstone and things being tough, and coming out the other side and going, oh, I wasn't that happy, but fuck, I got through it.

Yeah, I got through it.

Because in the past, in other areas of life, in the gym or in diet or in building your meditation habit or in business or in skill acquisition.

You have learned to associate, delayed gratification, you're basically marshmallow testing your way through life over and over again and you go, well look, the certain things that you just kind of need to embrace the suck and on the other side of which there will be, maybe not happiness but meaning and fulfillment and wellbeing and perhaps downstream from that you get some like fun and enjoyment and happiness and blah blah blah.

But probably not in your relationship, right?

I don't think anybody's going to congratulate you on your deathbed for saying he suffered in silence.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, except that I don't know that, I mean, it takes two to tango, right?

But I think that makes suffering the inevitable outcome.

And I remember when my wife and I were sitting across the table, like the message I sent to her we weren't speaking was no crying, no fighting, no screaming, and this was self -directed, I'm the emotional one.

We gotta say, are we still doing this?

This is it. Because the marriage we've had up until now is over, like are we gonna keep doing this?

But I remember that conversation when we both came to the realization we have both mutually chosen a miserable marriage.

And the beauty is we can choose a not miserable one.

And I think that agency of choice has been taken away by a culture of disempowerment.

So I think the idea of like, it's either bail or suffering silence.

I think that's a, that is, I don't think it's that binary.

I think you can also both be like, do we chose suck?

And I chose, I, I did something, whoever you may be, I, I stepped out on the marriage.

I, I gambled a bunch of money away.

Like I did an extra bad thing.

If you want to frame it like that.

We can both choose something different, and that, to me, is not on the table anymore.

But if you look past, the same thing happens relationally.

Those who stick it out and they choose something different, choose something magnanimous, which is very un -Romeo and Juliet, right?

You're supposed to just be star -crossed lovers.

It's stupid. It's nonsense.

You choose it, and you keep choosing it, and you keep choosing it.

Man, you see people who've been through hell and they're out on the other side.

That's the goofy guys that have real short shorts on and no business wearing that short of shorts at the beach and they don't care, right?

Because that's, because she loves them, right?

And it's a different kind of, it's a different kind of depth to that love.

I've heard you say before about how the time, I think this was your conversation with Arthur Brooks, the time when you want to pull away the most is the time when you're supposed to be in.

I did it last night with my daughter.

She nine years old, man, she's got a supernatural ability.

She knows where every single hidden button button side, even I had she just knows.

And. She screaming and hollering and yelling.

And so doing our nine year old stuff and started to walk away.

And I literally went downstairs to head out the door with the dog to go for a walk and I stopped.

This is that moment that's when Arthur Brooks is ringing in my head and he turned around you walk back in.

And I went and climbed into bed with her and my wife's reading a book and I just climbed, she shoved me out of the way?

I had to move. And then within 30 seconds, you hear her breathing different.

And then she reaches over and grabs your hand.

And that's what dads do, emotionally immature children run off.

Dads go right through it.

Oh yeah, you had a child on child war about to begin.

It's my seven -year -old.

You're in a nine -year -old.

Right? Yeah, right.

Dude. Oh was it who?

Ah, it may have been.

It may have been Salda Stefano that I called recently and was like hey, I'm having a disagreement with my fourteen -year -old and he just started dying laughing because I'm just gonna stop you right there and I was like what am I doing?

And I was like, I'll call you.

No, it was Layne Norton I called and I was like hey, I'm arguing with my fourteen -year -old and he goes, how about I just stop you right there?

I was like huh huh huh what am I doing right?

I used it for a living and it happens.

Yeah. Right? That's fucking funny.

And then you roll it off and you move on, right?

You know one final thing that I heard that I thought was such a fucking great rubric for um how do you know if you've sort of really given this as good of a shot as you can in a relationship before you decide to pull the pen, it was you know that you've made a serious effort by comparing the level of effort that you've put in to the people that you admire and the level of effort that they bring to something before they decide to quit.

Like just think about that.

Think about how much effort the people that you admire, the friends around you, people in your life, the people you look up to, think about how much effort they put into something before they go like, it's time to stop trying to grow roses in this parking lot.

I think that gives you confidence in your view that it's time to move on.

So you go, any other reasonable person would have said this is too much. Even the best of the reasonable people, which are the people presumably that I admire.

So I think what everybody wants to hear when they've got a really existential disagreement in a relationship is you know what man, you're not crazy.

Yeah, that's it. You're not crazy for thinking that.

And you go, oh my God, cause I was fracked with so much self doubt.

And I thought this was me being petty.

I thought this was me, and a lot of the times it is.

Right? And you need to know that's why you gotta have a fucking lane on the phone.

You got people, that's right.

But I thought it was me being petty.

I thought it was me being juvenile.

I thought I was being rash and Someone goes you're not crazy, you know crazy for feeling like that.

I think I think that's that's completely an acceptable position to hold Well, what do I do now?

Yeah, I actually have a fun because you get stuck in are my desires legitimate Mmm, should I be able to is it?

Okay to want what I want.

Yeah, and You know if you've had a life of marshmallow testing your way through things you have learned to not want what you want.

You've learned to put off the things that you want in place of doing something that's harder or more boring.

I think the illusion, though, is it's gonna feel a certain way.

Right, if I get what I want, then suddenly it's going to extrinsically fill that gap in my chest. And I think when you, I remember telling my counselor recently, my therapist recently, I just want to feel what I know.

And that was a heavy sentence that I'd never said before, because I know these things to be true, but I want to be able to feel them here, right?

And that becomes the word, getting from here to here.

A lot of people, especially now, are, what do you say, physiologically decapitated from the neck down.

Love that. You know, they just exist. And you know, this is me speaking to me as I desperately tried to get more embodied with stuff.

But dude, feeling feelings is really fucking hard. I went on a journey over the last year of trying to do it.

Speaking to Connor Beaton, speaking to every different expert that I could find to talk about, okay, so what does it mean to tap into your emotions?

What does it mean to feel feelings?

You know, Joe Hudson, are you familiar with him out of accomplishment?

Going on a seven -day retreat the back end of September with him, called ground breakers and they've got clinical studies showing that it moves neuroticism longitudinally, nudges neuroticism in the direction that you want it to and it makes a bunch of other personality changes but it's like Navy Seal Hell Week for your emotions.

So don't book anything for the next week.

And I'm really excited, I'm going to get daunted as I get close to But yeah man, one of the most interesting questions talking about wants is, what do you want to want?

I adore that question, it's an essay by Kyle Eschenroder from years ago, his website has now been taken over by like a Ukrainian porn thing.

Someone's got a hold of the WordPress logins and they've changed his website.

But I downloaded the PDF so I revisit it pretty regularly.

And, um, yeah, the question of what do you want to want, you know, because your.

Your desires define the path of least resistance that your life is going to take and a lot of the time people, so the things that you want, your desires will pull you in a direction that is the easiest for you to go, even if, even if that is very difficult, even if it's very difficult, yeah, of course.

And even if it is painful, even if it's toxic, even if it's malignant to the world at large, the things that you want.

It's the old the man who loves to walk will walk more than the man who's forced to walk, or whatever.

Your desires define the paths of least resistance inside of your life.

So, what you want to do is align the things that you want with the things that you want to want, Okay.

Because if you don't ever step in and ask yourself what you actually want to want, you end up having your desires defined for you by the worst parts of yourself.

That's exactly right.

And by society at large, and by the way you've dealt with past traumas.

And by the paths of least resistance, and all of this stuff.

It all comes together.

And then, if you're not careful, you end up in a place, not only that you don't want to be, but that you didn't even mean to get to.

Yes. And it doesn't solve the problem you thought you were trying to solve.

because what you wanted was not what you wanted to want.

So my wife's way of asking that question, we were sitting at that table, was one hand on the table like how do you want this house to feel when you walk in every day?

And dude I vomited.

I was like dude I want you to be happy that I'm here.

I want my daughter to come running at me with like an inside of a wrapping paper roll.

I'm always in this sword fight with her I don't even know him.

I want my son making fart noise, like I want the house to feel warm, she's like, okay, then you can't bring that last meeting in here, and you got to work out.

And you and I both know when you eat like this and this and this, we get the downstream grumpy dad three days later, and it became a very, but it became that, how do you want this place to feel when you walk in the room, in the house?

What a great question, oh my God.

Let's reverse engineer that.

Who the fuck is your wife?

She's Yoda, dude, yeah.

She's a Yoda, absolutely.

She's just a wise, still… I didn't realize you were the relationally retarded one in… Oh!

Are you kidding me?

Yeah dude! The guy that's got the call in show is the one that actually doesn't know anything about it.

But she never would have been at a punk rock mosh pit if it wasn't for me, so there you go.

Yeah, very important.

We each bring our pieces to the relationship!

Yeah. Okay, taking one step forward, what is your advice for how people can better move on from breakups?

They've got this… Gosh!

That's a great question!

rumination, they're struggling, checking the social media, everything reminds them of them.

I'm never going to find anybody as good.

How do people move on from relationships?

We've got a allergy to grief in our culture.

That's a natural process.

We used to have a room in the house called the Parlor, where the body would rest for two to three to four days before it was buried.

Now we outsource that, and we call it the living room.

I think it was Southern Living that declared it in the early 1900s.

Like it's no longer the parlor, it's now the living room, right?

But we've just plucked grief out of our lives, just this reality that things don't always work out.

And we had a collective group of people, you sat in the home with a dead relative right there, right?

It was just a part of the grieving process and the body's got ways that you begin to breathe again.

And somebody shows up with food and somebody shows up with food and somebody shows up with food and right.

it's like being at the beach and it feels like you're drowning, but you stand up, and the water's just only three feet deep, right?

And we've just, boom.

So, if you leave a long -term relationship, dude, the number of students that would come into my office and be like, Hey, I'm depressed.

My dad just moved out on my mom, and I'd always be like, Maybe you're clinically depressed, but I bet you're sad, and they didn't have a psychology for that.

Like, we don't do that.

That's a thing we solve.

We solve for sad. Like, no, man.

That's a basic human emotion.

Let's just be sad, like your family broke up, your dad left, let's sit in that.

And so if you lose an important relationship, man, your body's working right if it wants you just to stay under the covers for a while, your body's working right if you don't wanna go out, your body's working right if you're wondering, am I lovable?

That's not something to be solved, man, that's something to just sit with.

And if you don't have people in your life, Man, your body's going to spin out on you, dude, because it knows it can't carry that burden alone.

It is. We have to have, we have to have a place for grief, for being sad, and I think in our current world the only way to do it is to be what looks radical, right?

I'm gonna block people.

I'm gonna delete people.

I'm gonna take my phone off.

I'm gonna have a group of people that are gonna come to my house every night for two weeks.

I'm gonna play stupid board games something stupid, right, or whatever.

I'm gonna give myself permission to not go out for a month, because I'm tired, I just feel dry, man.

That's called just honoring the system, man.

You know what I mean?

It's honoring the system, because you're going to duct tape over that thing.

In counseling, we say it's called leakage.

It'll find a way out, and it usually finds a way out of the real inopportune time, or you can honor it and invite somebody to sit in there with you.

How can you tell if you've got leakage?

What are the most typical forms of leakage?

Oh, rage. Saying the words if they would just and I don't even care what the, I don't care who and what you're talking about.

If they would just. The guy in the car next to you.

Doesn't even matter.

If they would just. Yeah, if you start making up imaginary stories about people like the, I hear from most folks across the country.

That happens in the shower.

You start having imaginary conversations with people that you'll never have in real life.

If I see Chris again, dude, I'm going to tell that dude.

You're never going to do that.

It's your body just trying to spin up.

up. Brene Brown calls it dress rehearsing tragedy.

When you are just constantly in a loop of planning the next sword fight that you're gonna just do the super move at the end, man.

And your body doesn't know the difference, man, so it goes to war in the shower.

You ever done that?

You step out and you come out of your bedroom, and your partner's in there and you're mad!

They have no idea, and they're just eating, right?

You're like, how can you be eating?

You just had a 15 -minute argument with you.

Dude. And by the way I crushed you in that argument.

Yeah it's insane. Where you see your boss the next day after a night of like I'm going to tell you're not going to tell them anything right so it's when you go into solution solving mode a rage fighting running hiding and we broke up.

We had plans I'm gonna sit here.

Hey this is gonna be weird where you come over to my house bring tacos and I'm not gonna talk to you because it's gonna be weird. So I'm just gonna say we're gonna play video games right?

So you can watch a stupid game with me.

I'm going to a show about two tickets.

We're going to show no asking me about so and so we're just going to go you too old to be mosh pitting.

John. I know we're going anyway right and it's it's just honouring you're supposed to be sad supposed to be sad and then if you wake up 90 days later and it becomes you're going to work and we're going to call somebody right that's when it becomes a pathology you got to call somebody this episode is brought to you by hate sleep if you struggle to stay asleep because your body gets too hot or too cold, this is going to help.

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I seem to remember in a lost connections, Johan Hari's book that there's a carve out in the DSM for grief around depression.

Yeah, which to me undermines the whole don't get me start on DSM but that's a whole other thing.

It makes sense to me though that if you were to say, I feel depressed, my dad died yesterday, I broke up with my girlfriend yesterday.

Well, okay, the emotion might be that of depression.

So the symptoms are correct, but the diagnosis that's caused the symptoms or the cause of the symptoms seems to not fit.

It's completely irrelevant, yeah.

All diagnosis is in the DSM is a symptom of cluster, I mean, a cluster of symptoms, right?

That's it. Totally devoid of context.

The point being? You should be not sleeping or you should be sleeping all day.

You should not be able to control your thoughts or have just fog of in your head.

All those things are right, your dad died.

It's David Kessler who I think is the world's foremost guru in grief.

He says it's like a finger print, man, everybody looks different, and that's what you're trying to solve it.

Human, I spoke to a human about this years ago.

First ever episode that we did, and I was talking about getting over breakups and he said that it's the exact same circuits as grief.

That's exactly right, as death.

The problem is that they're still alive.

And you can be in touch with them, you can resurrect this dead person.

So imagine that a person that you felt the closest to died, but you had a button that could resurrect them and it happens to be in WhatsApp.

And there is always this sort of rumination, this potential, so I think that's why.

It sounds cheesy, but I always recommend somebody have a ceremony.

Okay, like a funeral for your relationship.

Yeah, and that can be like Sex and the City, like this big glory, it doesn't have to be that.

But it is, and I love Kessler also, says grief demands a witness.

Can't greed by yourself.

Just biochemically you can't do it by yourself.

You gotta have other people.

And so I'm gonna sit with you and we're gonna burn the letter.

We're gonna write the mean, whatever the mean thing is, but when we wake up tomorrow, probably a little bit hungover, a little bit exhausted, there's gonna be a period at the end of that sentence, and I'm just gonna be sad because I'm gonna reach to grab my phone to call her, and I'm not calling her.

I'm gonna pick up my phone, just give me no text.

It's so interesting the ceremony.

Yeah, but you have to give your body a period at the end of that sentence.

And we just rob ourselves of it.

We just go to the next, go to the next, go to the next.

Swipe right, swipe right, and we gotta exhale.

You're not broken. I love that circuitry that gets reused was really eye opening for me.

It's a loss, it's a loss.

It happens a lot with parents too.

When you become 35 and they're like, hey, that was abuse.

And they're like, you're coming for Christmas?

and you're like, I don't know man, you know what I mean?

That one's a tough one.

It happened a lot during, during me too.

Where... Huh, that wasn't, that wasn't so dialed that he touched me like that.

Well, it's like, he's a great dad.

We have three kids, he's a good provider, good husband, we have a great time.

Hey, I think that was right back in college.

What do I do now? Right?

and it's a yeah you're talking about like a real psychological train wreck man that's tough and those were hard things to navigate.

I mean fuck that this is one of the challenges I suppose of doing inner work they're doing any kind of introspection that you say turning over these rocks or looking I'm gonna open these doors inside this house I've lived in my entire life and then you realize that every so often you open one and there's fucking demon hiding in there.

Covered in shit. Yeah.

Well, and I w - I wonder if we...

Man, if we can get in a whole rabbit hole in this, that's for another show.

I remember my high school metal band.

We played at this event at the end of our senior year called, uh it was called Mike Stock, it was in an old skating rink and Chris to say that we crushed it.

Bro. Ha ha. I'm talking legend.

any record exec on planet earth signed us that day it was legend crushed it I went to college with my head held high the band kind of dissolved then like my sophomore year of college I'm at home back in Houston with my family somebody calls right bro we found a VHS of the record of the show somebody had a one of those big -box VHS dude we piled around the TV yo it was not good it was so bad dude I forgot the words it was a disaster it wasn't that's not good I forgot somebody broke a string and it got me thinking evolutionarily like my body created a story for that moment and me going back this technology

that has never existed those old photo albums that have never existed for all human history I don't know if that's super good for us and it's magnified now with kids who are like mom take a picture mom Let me see, can I see the video of me, the thing I just did.

That sort of recursive world.

We're just playing roulette with our nervous system.

Strange, right? Because in one - We're not designed to see that stuff.

Yeah, but as you just mentioned, in one way, sometimes we don't want to remember the shit that happened.

That's exactly right.

There's a protective measure to it.

Correct. Yeah, the psychological immune system, as it's known.

Adam Masroianni has this thing where he says, The closest thing to an equation in psychology is tragedy plus time equals comedy.

And yeah, something that's atrocious that happened a while ago can actually be funny.

That's what healing is, right?

That my body doesn't go to war again.

It doesn't act as though it's happening again.

Let's say... But you experienced it with your psychoanalysis, right?

Yeah. It opens a bunch of loops, man.

And now it's like, oh, I got a whole bunch of other work to do now.

Yeah, and I think a couple of the things that happened there, Stan Tatkin did Your Brain on Love, best book on attachment that I've ever listened to.

Only exists as an audiobook, to Your Brain on Love by Stan Tatkin.

Fucking outstanding.

He talked about how memories get moved from short -term memory to long -term memory and sometimes they sit in both.

And if you've got them sitting in both, that's really really dangerous.

Because the short -term memory is, this is still salient and I need to keep a hold of it.

The situation's live.

It keeps on feeding it and feeding it and feeding it.

And yeah, what you want to do is like, clear that shit out.

So he has two really great bits of advice for relationships.

He doesn't want stuff to get into long -term memory.

So he says, you have an incident that occurs with your partner, a triggering event of some kind.

And he says, you're goal should be, you need to be able to do this in less than about two minutes, so you need to plan and you need to talk about how you do this.

Something happens, your partner sort of jibs you at the dinner table and it really sort of sets you off, you're in front of someone that you're trying to get a promotion from or somebody respect or just a friend or a family member or something in your partner does something that really, really gets to you.

You need to be able to as quickly as possible in less than about two minutes, go to one side and say, Hey, look, like that thing that just happened.

And the partner needs to be able to at least bring you back down.

They don't need to fix it.

It's like, look, we can talk about this properly later on.

I just want to tell you how much I love you.

I'm really sorry that I didn't do that to just like, because because the longer that you leave that, the unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.

And that gets ported over into long -term memory and that's gonna stick about.

The other problem that you have is when, as you know from CBT, which is that, what's that eye tracking thing that they do?

EMDR, yeah. Yes. What are you doing with that?

You're trying to move things that are already too locked into short -term memory, your body still thinks that they're long -term memory but they're in short -term.

They're trying to get it out of short -term memory and push it across, because you're not gonna be able to get rid of from long -term memory anymore, so you have two choices.

cut it off so it doesn't go at all.

But then sometimes it's gone and it's still here in short term memory, so you need to get rid of it from that too.

So you've got EMDR for the stuff that's stuck about for too long and basically, as far as I can tell, if when you think about a memory, an uncomfortable memory, traumatic thing that happened in your past. If it still creates an emotional response inside of you, your heart rate rises, you get hot, you get flustered.

It makes you feel agitated.

If you see it from a first person perspective, if you're watching it through your own eyes as opposed to sort of watching it from above and behind.

If you can still sort of hear the sounds very viscerally, all of this suggests that it's still in short -term memory and I'm going to guess there's like a million ways.

Dude, I love that. Ethan Cross talks about a great way to get out of loops is to talk to yourself in the third person.

Yes, that's the reason you want, right?

Yeah, it's fantastic.

Hey, Jon, what are you going to do about this?

Yeah, yeah instead of, what am I, what am I.

What am I, what am I.

All right, Jon, you messed up.

Jon, you should go tell her, you're sorry.

Well, I need a children's shower and then we're off to, to protection.

Your ability to argue with yourself is impressive.

What would you say, you know, maybe someone's listening and, hey, fuck, I think that thing that happened to my, earlier on in my life, I think that was like messed up and I haven't really dealt with that thing and I think it's still playing in my mind a bit.

Where do people start with processing bad events like that?

If it's a traumatic event, if it's, I think it was rape, I think it was assaulted, I think it was abused, then I always think it's good to start with somebody.

Yeah, it's always good to put it on the table.

And, man, it can be really tough doing it with the person who, going to your parent or to your partner who may have done the thing because they're gonna instantly have to defend themselves and man, that cascade is messy.

So that's when you get a trusted friend or counselor just to say, hey, this happened.

Going back to what you said earlier, am I crazy?

And someone might say, yeah, a good friend would say, yeah, you're kind of crazy.

It's not a big deal.

Um, uh, or I just sat with a counselor recently and she was like, no, that's a big, that's a big one.

What about, what about something which is not quite, if that's a nine or a 10, what about, what about stuff that's fives?

That's right. At down and exhale.

And there's something, I think, I think there's something transcendent about getting out of your body and looking at it on a piece of paper.

descriptively. What are you doing?

Are you reliving it?

Are you allowing yourself to feel the emotions of it?

I think initially I want to know and I want to be able to write it down and say, my fifth grader has really been pissing me off lately, right?

And then you can exhale and say, does a fifth grader have the ability to piss you off?

Because if so, you're a really dysregulated adult, right?

And you can have that conversation.

If it is, I'm feeling like I want to hit my fifth grader.

Like I'm feeling this need, I just want to punch him through a wall.

Go talk to somebody because you're going to hurt somebody." So some of that is...

And then, gosh, what's the guy who did all the great work on journaling?

I mean, there is something really profound about 15 to 20 minutes of sitting in it and writing.

I haven't seen a lot of success with people doing that by themselves, doing it with somebody else.

So how do you journal with somebody else?

I do that now. With a guy named Luke LeFever.

Like, they give you prompts, and then they have you think through it, and then they have you exhale for a bit, and then they have you write 10 minutes, freestyle.

So this is like guided journaling?

It's not like you're not sitting with another person right?

Yeah. Oh, that's cool, and what's that called?

That's just a thing he does, but, um...

His name's Luke LeFever.

Is this an online course?

He's out of Nashville, yeah.

But he's a guy that always, he's always pushed and pushed, journaling, and push, journaling.

And I always kind of roll my eyes like I'm a grown man, don't need a diary, right.

And I knew the, I knew the, the therapeutic literature about write down the stuff.

That's good. But what I got really sophisticated at was writing down my injustices, writing down my gratitudes, and writing down my things I need to do to fix it.

And all of that was neck up.

Correct. It's all neck up.

Tapping into emotions.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is a, I mean, that's awesome.

And I, is there a name of his course?

Do you know it's a lot?

I don't. I can send it to you.

Cool. It's excellent.

So Rick is, is really, really good with this as well.

Rick Hansen from Hard Wearing Happiness.

And what he has is the HEAL Framework.

So Have, Enrich, Absorb, and then Optionally Linked at the end.

So have a good experience.

So a good opportunity right now might be fact, it's the first time I've met Jon and like, I'm really enjoying this.

And I feel competent and that's really fucking like, this is my this is my job, this is my life.

We're at work right now, yeah.

Millions of people that get to listen to this.

And I really hope it's helping them.

And fuck, that's awesome.

So have a good experience.

You need to notice it, right?

So you need a degree of mindfulness.

So you need to be able to see, have the experience and notice it.

So then you have enrich, which is sort of I'm allowing it to sort of fill a little bit.

And you're sitting with it for as long as possible.

Thirty seconds to a minute is really good.

And then you have absorb.

Absorb is imagine the experience sinking down and becoming a part of you.

So I think that's a little bit more embodied.

Yeah. Right? So you've got, oh, this is nice.

And I'm kind of up here and I'm high in rich. I'm sort of feeling it expanding and I'm sort of sitting in and then absorb, it's like sinking down into me and that's becoming a part of me.

And, um, I think you can do this.

I mentioned before and I, I did for a very long time, like 10, six month journals in a row, basically with like minimal breaks in between it for the end of my twenties until a couple of years ago, but a lot of it just ended up being homework.

It's like admin. And I'm like, I'm just paying fucking in retrospect.

I thought I was doing the thing and I shouldn't shout at a previous version of me who did the thing he thought he was supposed to be doing, but I was largely just filing stuff.

Whereas now – and this is half Tony Robbins, half Rick Hansen – I've dispensed with most of the other stuff from journaling on the morning and just three things that you're grateful for, but as opposed to just writing them down – take one minute for each thing And just really, so I had to call with my best friend, the guy who's best man I was at his wedding.

Had a call with him yesterday for like 45 minutes.

I was like, I fucking love Zac.

Like he always listens.

He's always got awesome advice.

He's in a good mood all the time.

He's really receptive.

He's so fun. Like he really cares.

He really cares about me and it's so nice.

And you're like allowing that and sense.

I think, fuck, that took a minute to do.

What was the other one?

The fresh air this morning, just smelled awesome.

Like coming through the window in front of my bedroom.

I'm like, ah, it smells so good.

Like it's really, really refreshing.

What was the other one?

I developed bravery and courage to overcome difficult things and I wouldn't have done that previously.

I'm thinking about how proud of yourself you are that you've done this stuff.

Like three really, but one of them was literally the fucking wind.

But so, and I just finished that and I was like, I only had three minutes before the gym in any case.

And I was like, that was so fucking nice.

What a lovely way to start a morning.

I get the sense that a lot of journaling done badly, kind of ends up being a like a highlighter girl from school who has a very well -organized ring binder of what she was doing that day.

Yeah, for me it becomes like a weekly report for a business.

What did I do? What was my up or down?

Yeah, it's a P &L. That's exactly right.

A buddy of mine going to a retreat right now and his reached out and said, hey would you, the retreat director, ask for a few of his closest friends to write a letter and I don't know what he'll get from that letter but I tell you what it was, it really was transformative for me.

It was so much so that my 14 year old comes be -bopping in just you know in his underwear and like hit it like I said hey I want you to read this I'm going to read this to you out loud this is me this is a letter I'm writing to my friend I want him to hear with his dad that his dad's got adult male friends like this And it was cool for him to hear that.

And at the end he was like, cool, dad.

Like in, you know, okay, I just have to hope it's downloading somewhere.

It was like, I had this big spiritual moment and he's like, all right, dad, that's cool.

He's upside down on that little teeter thing, just hanging there.

But man, it lifted my spirits to know, oh, I got a friend that good.

I got a friend that good, man.

And so maybe that's an important exercise, but it takes you back, right?

He's the guy I called my wife when I had to labor.

I don't know what to do, man.

He's the guy who I called when I thought I was gonna get let go from a job.

He's the guy I called before the very first parent I had to tell their kid died.

I called him, because I'd heard him do it before.

And I was like, I want to make sure I'm doing this right.

And he said, you're doing it right.

Don't ever call me again.

You got this. Right?

And that kind of blessing, that everyone wants from their dad, right?

And so it was it, but, but it took me back to those moments.

Just, you're, you're remembering those moments.

And man, but that was me writing him a note, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what's it like for him to but in some ways, you know, being selfless is one of the most selfish things you can do.

Right. Because you get all of the positive sense of that.

But yeah, you know, male normative xalexithymia, that it's so common now among men to not feel feelings that it's got a fucking name.

And yeah. It's like that's like spray painting your dashboard. Like that doesn't make you tough on your cool Texas pickup truck, just spray painted black, I don't need these gauges.

What a moron, that's dumb, you're gonna run out of gas and get a rack.

Yes. Right. And also, if you are drive constantly looking at your dashboard, you're gonna crash too, right?

Gosh, man. I don't get, and you're in this world more than me, I just, I don't understand the tribal disassociation from reality.

It's just so strange, I don't, and look, It's bananas.

I think. It's bananas.

I think that there is a big cohort of people in the world who need David Goggins screaming in their face to go harder.

And that may be. Do they need that or is it pornography?

Because I wonder from that.

Perhaps it's some sort of like.

Is it insane sensational that it becomes, you get what I'm saying?

Yeah, I do understand.

I get the sense that most people that listen to shows like this are type A people with a type B problem.

They're hard charging insecure overachievers that need to learn to chill out and play video games.

But there is a really big cohort of type B people with a type A problem who are too lazy, not sufficiently disciplined, they don't have upward mobility, they don't have a sense of agency, they don't feel like they have control over their life.

And the problem is that people that have got type A people with type B problems, like, Oh my god, sorry, you've just got too much discipline.

and you keep winning the marshmallow test all the time.

No one's going to give you sympathy for this.

But they'll see your heart attack from space.

Oh, of course. But it sounds like if you are a David Goggins -y, like, hard charging, pick yourself up, don't, you don't need to fucking worry about how you feel, just keep on going guy.

That sounds like every underdog movie that you've ever heard because every underdog movie has a dude down on his luck who needs to sort himself out by getting disciplined and there's an old Japanese guy who teaches him how to do kung -fu, and he gets a girl, and everything's great.

There are no movies about how to log out of Slack at 6pm, or learn to spend a day under a tree, because that sounds opulent and bourgeois and privileged and a champagne problem.

It's like, dude, just chill out.

No one gets told to just work harder.

So you need instruction to work harder, you don't need instruction to just chill out.

Because the assumption is that chill is the set point and work is the abberation.

But that's not the case.

For a lot of people, that's not the case.

A lot of people... That's a great frame, dude.

Yeah. Type A people, Type B problems. Type B people, Type A problems. Huh.

That's a fantastic frame.

I've always thought that the way...

...the internet has taken Gaga's message and spit it out...

...it makes it look like a running Rocky IV montage.

Correct. But it's actually happening at all, like, in real time.

Yeah. But it's happening in his life.

But everybody likes Rocky.

You would not have liked that workout.

It was cold man. Like, no one would've stuck it out, but it looks cool with the music.

Everyone wants to feel like, if things go badly for me, I can get myself back to where I want it to be.

That's right. Yeah.

Yeah, dude. As opposed to, if everything's going right for me, I need to learn to chill out.

But, you're right, you will see.

A few years ago, I joined just a local, you gotta be kidding me, like church league basketball.

and my knees were like, no bro, we had a deal.

Yeah, I'm gonna stop.

And yeah, it was two surgeries worth, man.

But we had a contract, but I was like, no, I can be 19 again.

It's like, I can't dude.

Bro, the most common, I used to be a college athlete and I'm about to give myself like a double fucking tendinopathy is basketball by far.

So I played cricket until I was 20, 21.

I got my grades reduced to get into the university I got into because I was gonna go and play high level for them.

It was, I'd done everything.

It was my entire life throughout my childhood.

And I stopped playing for a decade and a bit and then COVID came along and I was like, I should play cricket again.

And the first game back I snapped my Achilles.

And that was 12 months of rehab and three and a half months in a boot and a surgery, the first major surgery I've ever had.

And I learned a lesson I already knew.

One of my friends snapped every CL, every CL in his knee, all of the CLs went.

Tom Segura managed to snap his knee and his arm in the same move playing basketball.

It's like, guys, if you used to be fit and you're now 40 pounds heavier than you used to be and you've not conditioned anything and the only running that you do is to avoid with the rain going from the car to the house, don't try basketball because you're gonna fuck something up.

But we do it with everything, we do it with drugs, we do it with relationships.

Oh yeah. Like if people who abstain from cocaine.

Oh I'm gonna fuckin' run this back, watch me.

I'm gonna start where I ended.

Yeah exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's essentially like I press pause on a video game, and like sniff a 1000 video game, and then I'm gonna immediately, just going to the gym, taking a break, everybody knows.

or marriage, right?

You get out of a divorce and you try to date at the level of the marriage, you just left, like, what are you doing, man?

Yeah, no. It's not gonna happen.

Dude, you're fucking awesome.

Well, I appreciate you.

You're absolutely awesome and I can't wait to have you back on and today was so much fun.

And where should people go?

They wanna keep Hey, before we kick off, can I ask you a question?

You got time? Yeah, make some time, as long as you want.

I got two questions for you.

Okay, so, your ability over the last few years to dig in at the—what I would seriously call the doctoral level at evolutionary psychology.

Tell me about that.

Like I'm just thinking of you as one of my grad students.

Like, it's been phenomenal to watch. Thank you.

Um—I don't know. I guess— And that's not me blowing smoke, because I'm gonna—I'll bait and switch here in a second.

But I'm gonna—like, tell me about that.

I got interested in it, um, toward the back end of 2020— '21.

I really started thinking about mating dynamics, and I think it's so fundamental to how the world works, you know, survival and reproduction, okay, survival thing has been sorted by medicine so let's talk about reproduction, and reproduction is mating dynamics, and I just really fell in love with understanding I guess the nuts and bolts of how human attraction works, about how mate values work, about mate guarding, jealousy, male parental investment, all of this stuff, and I kind of got welcomed with open arms by the EP world which I was very fortunate about, you know, people like Rob Henderson,

William Costello, Dr. David Buss, you know, Dr. Robert Ploman, even though he's behavioral genetics, all of that world of unspeakable, fucking like totally cancelable academics really were very kind to me.

And, um, I don't think anyone had fully stepped into the world of EP at the level that this show was at and, and, and is at now, I don't think anyone really opened it up and I think that it's very interesting.

I think that you know fundamentally my question is why are we the way that we are.

That's you know I'm trying to understand myself in the world around me and I think the EP gives us a really wonderful look into it and then you can look at human behavioral ecology you can look at evolutionary biology but I just found it so compelling that I didn't stop and then I spoke at HBES I spoke with the human behavioral evolutionary society in Palm Springs I was part of a symposium there.

I'm about to get my first, I don't know what it is, citation authorship on a study.

Congratulations man.

So this is going to be cool I'm going to do this with Candice Blake and Macken Murphy about I have a theory that people who are in shape will be more threatened by potential as epic use than people who are out of shape.

Absolutely. Despite the fact that people who are out of shape would be having their like true selves denied as the fat acceptance movement falls away.

You know Lizzo's like in good like moderately alright shape and I don't know if you've seen it, she's lost like, it must be over 100 pounds um so she looks very different, but the reason being that if you are someone who's quote unquote in shape, I'm aware the Ozenpic doesn't make you in shape it just makes you skinny, but um if you're someone who's in shape your fitness signal is being and being derogated by this person, being able to get an easy route to something that you had to use willpower to do, and you're going to see that as a threat.

And yeah, I've moved a little bit.

I'm still super interested in an EP and if anyone's bringing out a new book, and I just had Bill Von Hippel on.

I guess, Evolutionary Anthropology, technically.

So I'm still balls deep in it, just did a great conversation with, who the fuck did, Matt Ridley about, it's like Bird's, Bird's Sex in Darwin or something, which is all about sexual selection, that was yesterday.

I love it, and I'm super interested.

I'm now moving a little bit more neuroscience, emotions, feeling, feelings.

I really adore the neuroscience stuff, but.

So what is, has, can you point to something that EP has given you?

No interest. in terms of, it's a self -serving question, like, if you exhale and say, okay, here's what this has given me in my daily life over the last four years of just swan diving into this because your grasp of it is, is profound.

What is it, what is it, All, even the most mindful person in the world, even you at your most peaceful, you have a sense that you are the author of your own desires, of your own needs, of your own wants, of your own actions.

But realizing that you are basically a vehicle for your genes and understanding the myriad of different ways that they pull a bait and switch on you.

And just realizing how little you're in the driver's seat has been oddly reassuring in a way because it makes you feel less alone, because you understand that you're not personally cursed by this thing.

Perfect example. Here's one good example.

So, basically, your pathologies are not some unique idiosyncratic issue that only you deal with.

They're endemic and they're a part of being a human.

That would be, like, kind of...

Or they're not characterological.

Yes, yeah, exactly.

So, perfect example of this.

Dr. David Buss writes a book, And in it he talks about how there is a part of the male brain which is rewarded, rewarded with pleasure, for looking at things that just look sexual.

He talks about how guys will happily look at a pair of rocks that look like boobs.

And you go, okay, it is inherently rewarding for guys to look at stuff that looks sexual.

And he got this letter from a man who said, I just wanted to let you know that your book saved my marriage because I was looking at other women and I was finding them attractive, even though I wasn't going to go and do anything, and I thought that there was something wrong with my relationship.

I thought that that was an indication that my marriage was broken because I found other women attractive.

I wasn't gonna cheat on my partner and I love it to death, but I saw other women as attractive and your book told me that, yeah, you're a guy.

You're gonna see other women that are attractive as attractive and you have a system that's in -built in you that you do not have control over, And that'll...

Okay. So when I don't eat for a while, I get hungry.

Sense. But for every...

You know, behavior, for a lot of things, it just makes me feel like, Oh, The things that I struggle with aren't some personal deficiency.

They are just part and parcel of you being you.

That's fantastic. I'll have to think about that.

I like that a lot. That's good, one more question and you can say I don't wanna talk about this and that's fine.

I've been wrestling with the weight, so when I think of not weight physically but weight of the jobs we have and when I go back to like an EP mindset, there's no way in your it like X's and X's above where I'm at.

There's no way we've got the cognitive or the physical wiring to hold this, right?

And so I'm wondering if things like anxiousness or depressive symptoms or a need, there's just kind of a path, there's a path, I'm watching people like head down spiritual paths, I'm watching folks wrestle with autoimmune disorder, like, I'm wondering how much of this is, there's, there's, there's a huckster on every corner saying, here's why you feel this way.

Here's why you feel this way, here's why you feel this way.

way. I'm wondering if there's not something on the squat bar, there's just so much weight.

And they don't have a, I don't have a, it's just a hypothesis I'm wrestling with that at some point, every body, every physical embody body has a different program for how do we, like some people shake, some people just throw the bar off.

Some people try to do it anyway and they, you know, they blow their knees out.

if there's something in Chris's body that's saying this thing's gotten really heavy?

Yeah, that's a good question.

Yeah, perhaps. Your discussion, the one podcast I just picked up was you had a really eloquent discussion and I know you don't like talking about it but I was really captivated by the just wrestling with the weight of somebody going to war, their body going to war with them, right?

Yeah, I mean, look, it's been a rough 12 months Physically for me, America is a fantastic country, but it tries to kill everybody that enters it.

Yeah. That way, it can sell you a cure.

That's good, yeah, yeah.

The food, the water, the air, the building materials, everything, the cars, the fucking everything.

And, perhaps, I mean, you, look, someone asked me a question about, And this is self -serving too, because I got my own stuff, not that, but.

Look, here's the way to look at it.

most people are stuck, most people that are hardcharging are stuck somewhere on the spectrum between guilt and overwhelm, right?

It's like, choose your direction, Western man, because if you've got that type A energy, you are going to continue to want to do stuff, you're going to want to drive harder, more, more, more, I just did the number one bestseller, but let's look over the shoulder of it as I'm receiving it, to ask what's next, in some ways this is very early because I'm still in it right.

I haven't fixed it and if you haven't fixed the thing you can't fully feel sort of appreciation for it but trying to find some of the silver linings one of the things it's really done is it's taught me the value of a slower pace, slower pace of life taking pleasure in simpler things because when your capacity gets restricted and this is for anybody that's going through health problems it it brings you back to a much more, sort of, pure sense of yourself, you're not able to use bravado, or momentum, or distraction in the same way that you would previously.

It's like stripped back, right?

You really see - Or a YouTube milestone doesn't matter when you can't breathe, right?

Yeah, you see who you are underneath in many ways, and I think it reminds you of the stuff that really, really doesn't matter, because if you can't do all of the things, you have to do a few of the things, and presumably the few things you choose to do are much more important.

So, my feeling around this is, I do not want to look back on a life or a career of miserable successes.

I don't want, and this is where, you know, I love Holmosey, he's a fantastic friend, but he is a one in a couple of hundred million Constitution, and I don't think that most people are built to work like he is.

And that's where, if I had to, if I had an angel and a demon sat on either shoulder, the angel would be Chris Bumstead and the demon would be Alex Holmosey, Chris would be saying you should just chill out and, you know, eat some chicken with your friends, and Alex should be saying like, don't listen to your feelings, stop being such a pussy.

And, uh, I'm way more in the C bum energy than I am in the hormones energy at the moment.

And I think you can switch between the two.

Sure. But, or seasonally, right?

Yeah, yeah. But I just get the sense that if you want to enjoy, presumably the reason you want success and you want to work hard is so that you can find some sort of enjoyment at the end of it.

And you have to be careful not to sacrifice the thing that you want which is joy and happiness for the thing that's supposed to get it which is success.

Like, you're literally cutting off at the knees the opportunity for you to enjoy things along the way because you're so concerned about getting the thing that gets you what you want.

The reason that you wrote the book was to enjoy something.

During the process of writing it you were thinking about whether it was going to be successful during the promotion of it you were thinking about whether it was going to be successful and during the success of it, you were thinking about whether the next one would be successful.

At no point have you arrived.

It's like running toward a mirage, every step you take you want the horizon, the horizon moves one further step away from you.

And, uhm, yeah, the only f**king way to, like, win any game is to stop, first off, stop moving the goalposts because if every time you try and f**king kick the ball toward it and it goes, about to cross the line, you like move the goal another 100 yards back, you say, well, that's not gonna work, so I'm very much in my, at least trying to embrace my slower, more -considered energy, really, really hard trying to not take the same levels of satisfaction and dopamine from chaotic business.

What you should be trying to do is move your life toward an outcome that you want, and have proxies for that because like the outcome that I want like a good life, real amorphous, so you have stuff like I go to the gym every day and I make sure that I speak to my wife and I have a project that I care about and all of those are broken down into subcomponents right I lift the weights in this sort of a manner and we have these kinds of conversations at this sort of a cadence I have to answer slack and I have to do emails and so on and so forth but don't mistake the little steps that you're supposed

to take to get somewhere for the thing that you're supposed to be doing and you need to regularly be reassessing is the thing that I'm doing moving me toward my goal?

Because when you start on a journey, a lot of the time, you need to be answering every email and checking Slack all the time.

And you need to be like chaos, go, go, go, go, go, like super Adderall mode.

And then a little bit later, you think well, I kind of don't need to do that quite so much. Maybe, you're part of a team now in the organization that you're in or maybe it's your own business and you've got some people that can actually do that on your behalf.

You go, your entire reason for doing this was to not have to do things you don't want to do anymore.

you are at the stage where you don't have to do things you don't wanna do anymore and you're addicted to still doing them because they gave you such a sense of completion and you have existential angst if you're not busy every single day.

You look at your calendar as a judge of your self -worth and if your calendar is stacked how can you be a piece of shit?

I can't be useless.

Look how many people need me.

Look at all of the people that need me.

If I wasn't here what would they do?

What would all of these just reaching out to check calls.

That's why Americans won't take vacations right there.

Oh, because they feel like they always need to be on the grind?

Is it not because they're all poor and they don't get any maternity leave?

Well, there's definitely that.

Structural issues also.

No, there's no psychology for what if I'm not needed.

That's not restful.

There's a pastor in Nashville that says if busyness is your drug, rest will feel like stress.

You can't, it's like being off -cope for a week.

I think a beautiful equivalent of that is the ancient Greek word for work is translated as not at leisure so the Greeks saw leisure as the set point and work as an aberration.

Oh wow. Now in the modern world we see work as the set point and leisure as an aberration, so we've turned it upside down.

And just to go back to how you're dealing with, like is it pressure of doing all of the stuff causing stuff to arise in your body perhaps.

And you know, it's too late to fucking turn it around now, so I'm just doing my best. It's a realization.

I said, the fuck is I talking to about this?

I can't remember who I was talking to?

I do know who I was talking to.

CEO of one of the companies that I work with.

And he's about to have a kid, and he was saying, hey man, my drive's dropping a bit.

I was like, you're doing your wife's eight months pregnant.

It's like, yeah. I was like, you know the science on this.

Testosterone drops in men when they get into a relationship, it drops again when their wife gets pregnant and they're about to give birth.

Like, you know that that's your kid.

Like, you're ready for this to happen.

And it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I was like, can we just for a second imagine that you might have had an aneurysm in five years time and that this has saved you from it?

Because we don't know.

We don't know what was coming down the path.

Can we imagine just for a second that this gives you a new, more nurturing approach to being able to run your business, which actually stops some impending catastrophe that would have happened if you'd gone more hard charging.

We just don't know where it's going to end up.

And for the first time in today's conversation to talk about faith, George Janko refers to periods where people are struggling.

And he says, every man knows God when he's at his lowest. And I think about that, going back to a more sort of stripped -back version of you, sort of remembering, I don't have momentum, I don't have ego, I don't have bravado, I don't have the charisma, I don't have the charm, my stories are less compelling, and my aura is less energizing and all the rest of it, alright, what's left?

Like, who am I deep down?

Who am I now, yeah.

Yeah. One of my values or my virtues, when I'm not quite as flamboyant as I usually am.

Do people still like me and do I still like me?

I think, again, it's still early days but I think I like me a lot more now than I did before I had to fight a ton of health problems because it's reminded me that sort of the person that's underneath all of that stuff when I have to go to bed at eight p .m. every night and when I'm tired all the time and when my mood's not right and when I need to rely on people more.

I think that's a good person.

And I don't think that I would've realized that or I don't think I would've known that if that hadn't happened.

That's fantastic. Whether Chris is a guy worth taking care of.

Chris is a guy worth feeling good, yeah.

I think I like me. That's fantastic, man.

What a gift. Thanks for sharing that with us, man.

I appreciate it. That's awesome.

Hey, dude, I can't wait to bring you back on.

Appreciate you, man.

You're fucking great, where should people go?

They wanna check out all of the stuff you.

I've got, I co -hosted a Ramsey show with Dave Ramsey, talking about money, and then I got my Dr. John DeLone show, it's called Dr. Laura show, people call in mental health and marriage problems and we get them solved.

It's awesome. Everyone should go and subscribe.

Until next time, appreciate you.

Thank you, brother.

[The Art of Presence, Holding Space, and Redefining Success]-[#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?]

📋 Summary

The Architecture of Compassion and Presence

The Power of Silence and Shared Experience

The Transactional Trap: Being Loved for Who You Are

The Masculinity Dilemma: Needs vs. Wants

Evolutionary Psychology and the Burden of Modernity

Conclusion: Moving Toward a Slower Pace

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[The Art of Presence, Holding Space, and Redefining Success]-[#920 - John Delony - Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing?]

📋 Summary

The Architecture of Compassion and Presence

The Power of Silence and Shared Experience

The Transactional Trap: Being Loved for Who You Are

The Masculinity Dilemma: Needs vs. Wants

Evolutionary Psychology and the Burden of Modernity

Conclusion: Moving Toward a Slower Pace

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🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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