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

Dr. John Deloney, 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, 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 for texting people.

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

So I'm not falling for the PSYOP.

I can't quite get to that.

I'm up to sidewalk and trash can, but you're all not yet.

What's the alternative to trash can?

Rubbish.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You got to be careful with rubbish bin here.
Rubbish bin. Yeah, you don't know what that means.
Crack that open. Come on, get it in you.
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.
Orange sunrise for you. Excellent.
This is my first one. This is my live review.
Cherry popper. That's outstanding.
That's outstanding. Well done outstanding that's outstanding well done man thank you well done good good yeah it's uh you're now five iq points smarter 10 let's see each sip is i accept man they'll 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 that 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 or 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.
it's um i wanted so badly to be the uh the huerman of of mental health and of relationships and early on it was very clear that's not why people want to talk to you they've never seen a big tall loud tattooed up texan talk to that mother who just blew her life up like compassionately and i think in our in our strange little weird uh 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 that's 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 the um 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 um she was a research professor she quit her, she's like, man, it sounds strange, especially for her. I think I want to stay at home and have kids.
And that was like, who are you? What have you done with my wife? It was amazing. We talked through it.
It was awesome. And gets pregnant, miscarriage number one.
Gets pregnant, miscarriage number two. Then miscarriage number three.
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 thing after miscarriage one and especially number two lucky her, she was married to a guy working on his second PhD. And I was also a crisis, God, the 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, in my graphs, in my answers.
And then this happened. So a close friend of mine who's suffered unimaginable loss.
I show up with my son who was four at the time. We go to the ER, they're wheeling 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 scene's safe.
You know, it seems classic. And then there's something we call crazy eyes.
You look across and it's like, oh, this scene's still live. Like there might be a shooter still here.
Right. And you can see it.
And I walked in and I made eye contact with the head of the OBGYN out at Texas Tech Medical Center. And I remember holding my son's hand saying, oh, this is it.
This is the last time I see her. And 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. And the physician busts in the door holding like a iPad thing.
And she says, you 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 even 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 friend has a breakup, golly, dude, the last thing they need is all of your theories and answers. And well, oh my gosh, let's Google it.
That's catastrophic. They just need you to sit there and bring tacos, bring a bottle of wine or bring whatever you got 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,'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 i mean it's a beautiful story and uh the first time that i ever really started thinking about this was uh sean strick on Theo Vaughn's podcast a year ago, where Sean has that really bad experience sort of 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. Sean is sort of gripping this bottle.
I think he's gripping the bottle with his left hand he's drinking from it like this and you can see he's 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 um because theo kind of he 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 better communicator in difficult times um but there's some things that you do that just rip someone out just a little bit and then they 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 back into it. And then, you know, the most beautiful thing that Theo says in that entire exchange is, is 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? Like, we don't have to say anything.
I'll just sit here with you. Powerful, dude.
What a gift. What else? What else? So, shut up.
Yeah. One of the first things that you should do when trying to help somebody that's going through stuff what else um yeah i think that sounds easy in theory but i think that 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'll say most of the people Who get diagnosed with cancer

Who lose of the space i'm gonna hold with you right so i gotta show up okay most of the people i'll say most of the people um who get diagnosed with cancer who lose a loved one who lose a pregnancy etc they'll tell you they found themselves responsible for making sure everybody else is okay and don't text somebody how's it going like you really want to know how's it going right and i'm going to text that back to you um bring food show up and i mean i think it's it's action it's action it's action it's action i'm gonna 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 they may go straight to the trash can um but you're gonna you're gonna know when the fog lifts you were loved you were cared. Yeah, you were 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's Jonathan's dog doing doing here uh 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 like celebration for me and there's only five people there all of them worked for me in one form or another or work with me and uh 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 so it's tiny and my best friend was getting married the next day and i was his best man here in texas so you know i'm my head's in a different place i'm thinking about the speech you know i've just finished this episode i gotta go and work on the speech i gotta remember the thing that do the joke about the white people and uh 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 they were one of the guys was filming it our videographer max was filming it and uh i was like oh this is really really beautiful and then we sat down 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, well, if they're doing this just because they love me, then I need to be able to sort of feel that in a way as opposed to there being some sort of value exchange you know all of these people in

one form or another work with me work for me and uh that's fine you know we're working together we're building this project we're doing the whatever thing and uh yeah watching five people sing happy birthday to me at 2 30 p.m on a friday i did a live show in london last year to three and a half thousand people the five people was way more uncomfortable yeah yeah because i was seen by them.

But think of the world

we've set up.

Dr. Joy five people was way more uncomfortable yeah yeah because i was seen by them but but think of the world we've set up um dr joyner he's out of florida state he writes really eloquently on suicide right and one of the the the three legs of the stool is of when you're doing a suicide assessment is perceived burdensomeness does that people would be better if i wasn't.
But look at the world we've built. Like, I'm not going to ask you to take me to the airport.
I'll just Uber. I'm not going to ask you, can I borrow some eggs and sugar? I'm just going to like Instacart or whatever.
And I think the meta narrative is my presence is a burden too. And if you guys, it's the air we breathe, that everyone, I'm going to bother gonna bother people even and now every relationship we have is transactional and your experience is man it's very common that you wake up and the only people in your life are on your payroll or on somebody's payroll like y'all are on on the same payroll and man that 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 this um do 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 yeah some of the conversations yeah you have some housewife i've heard you speak to a bunch of these recently a housewife who's there was one that had insomnia she kept waking up throughout the night oh yeah yeah yeah the same thing you said how 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 we're so obsessed with um 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 uh compatriots and uh 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 uh it's an odd blend you it makes people into a 401k is it your opinion that there is something lesser about friendship with people that you work with too uh no i the fear i have is when you don't have jujitsu and when 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 selected for a group that want to be punched in the face yeah but there's also like a male nurse and this guy doesn't have a job at all and this guy's a dean of students i mean 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 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 that's right 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 that's it that's it man and you sit there like yeah it's hot yeah yeah how's work yeah the only the only thing you have in common is the fact that your wife knows their wife that's it yeah and usually that is y'all have kids in the same age and then when that kid moves up yeah the 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.

Yes.

And that's hard to hold.

James, you spoke about him earlier on,

the other half of Nutonic.

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 going to 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, you know, people loving you for what you do feels transactional.
It feels flimsy. It feels volatile.
And, you know, 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, and you know i told this story on the pod and someone asked well 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 that's right 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 you know like like genuine good traits that are as timeless as you can be you know 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're gonna 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 that's a's a um 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 uh it was always a sense of tension always always always always

and the book comes out um 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 therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist,

my therapist, my therapist, my therapist, my therapist, my therapist, my therapist, my therapist, my therapist 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 cop and a minister she was like getting the lake house right it's very happy we've got lots to 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 a psychology for it i'm downstairs my family has come and they've been with maybe seven to ten days too long and they know it i know it it's that strange like i'd be good if y'all left and they're like would be good if we left and it's just that awkward they leave i've got covid um as they're leaving and then i'm working out in the gym in my basement my manager calls and he says 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, ah, 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 wake up i'm going to speak at this thing and this thing and um she's a very stoic west texas woman like just will withdraw and wait till things are calm she didn't do that she came forward this time and she got this close which is not how 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 people out and I'm cheering. And then she said this, she said, the pie piece, 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 is enough?

And it was a psychology for it.

And I didn't understand what does that mean when someone just says, no, no, no, no.

I picked you.

The joke in our house is she bought real low on me, right?

Like she bought it when the stock was really low on me. She's like, I picked you.
The joke in our house is she bought real low on me, right? Like she bought it 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 now. Go do it.
This is for your ego. This is not for us.
And I got hot. But then I went straight to the therapist's office but we ended up in this 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 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 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 got to practice, but I have to practice saying, you're a good dad. Yeah, this yeah this sounds cheesy i carry this with me this is a like when the thoughts pop in like uh your kids would be better off if you were at home right now they wouldn't they're doing great they're right it's that negative self-talk and just resetting that oh so you're doing some cbt homework that's exactly right yeah yeah my act act.
I've started CBT this year and I did twice weekly psychotherapy for a year. Okay.
How was that? Tough, actually, in retrospect. 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 uh and many many years of journaling um 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 because there's no action steps yeah that's exactly right yeah correct yeah uh and maybe for some people who aren't as dopamine norepinephrine as me that's fine because they can just sit in the story but if i can't do that if i've got open loops i'm going to try and fix them and i think that this is there's lots of different modalities where people can improve their mental health where people can improve the quality of their life uh your outcomes may vary sure they say in trading or whatever it is and i think psychotherapy is really really useful for learning about, but you need something which is more action focused.
So for me, CBT has 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, I have in, 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 i cbt is obviously it's the it's the gold standard i found the act the acceptance of commitment instead of challenging the thoughts so much just letting them walk by or letting them be that guy at the table that always you always know that guy everybody has that friend and i you spoke and i'm going to move on.
That's interesting. And it keeps me from going to war with myself.
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That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. 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 and 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 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 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, why am I doing what I do? Well, if you're doing it because you think it's going to 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 it. Yeah, it's nonsense.
And I think the alternative that we've got the last 15, 20 years well i'm just going to opt out and play video games and that's a recipe for disaster too i think we uh you know michael easter's book the comfort crisis which i think is a masterpiece i think we have a culture that's 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 they had a breakdown on espn the other day of alex uh pierre and his they talk about how hard he hits that it's otherworldly and the they had interview with a referee is like he the sound it makes when he hits another human is different. Right? And I just thought, man, can you imagine being able to 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 she loves me no matter what that actually drives that anchor deep into the concrete so you can repel off the edge and go do something bananas yeah 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 well i mean you know that's a phenomenal piece of advice and i i put that essay out and perhaps unsurprisingly a lot of uh girls the women who uh caught a hold of it or follow me on instagram said well like women want this too and i'm like yeah i'm they i'm sure they do can i tell you that drives me crazy that makes me insane dude the 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

that's

what about moms

I guess

moms too

but I was

I failed as a dad

at this moment

I was just writing 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 of boys and men

yeah so he's great

American Institute of Boys

and the direction god almighty dude it's wild it's wild i had a conversation with richard reeves sat here um gosh what richard oh my gosh yes of boys and men yeah so he's great american institute of boys and men and um it was the second time he'd been on and we got we went for like three and a half hours it's phenomenal um and i mentioned i was getting a bit frustrated at the fact that every time i talk about the problems facing boys and men i need to do this weird social land acknowledgement yeah dude 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 the sexual assault blah blah blah and after we've got 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'm like, can I say this once at the beginning of my career and never have to say it again? Because it's, you know, part of it's clipping culture that if somebody is 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 that. I might as well not even say it.
But what about this what if what if as a as a society we just chose i'm gonna think the best of chris well the problem 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 got uh popped for his n-word video which is like five, actually hard-Ring your way. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
A combination of A-ing and hard-R-ing. Anyway, this video goes live and Joe's like, yeah, fuck, that looks bad.
That's not good. And the internet was told by legacy media, this is what this guy is truly like and And this is what it means about him.
He's really the secret, bigoted, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, transphobic, blah, blah, blah, 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 they were trying to convince are 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 this speculation the the opportunity for people to point a finger and say i see i got him i got him yeah and um no the 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 like religion, finance, are y'all friends?

Like I've got a buddy who lives what?

Five hours West of here.

His name's John too.

He was fat John.

I was hyper John.

And back in the day, dude, always leave cans out everywhere.

Always, always, always, always.

This single worst text responder in human history.

It doesn't matter. A guy cannot respond to a text.
text it's phenomenal not one time have i ever left his house and thought he let 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 does he does he not love me what does this mean for us not once he's my friend that guy stood in front and thrown punches on my behalf. Literally.
He's opened up his house to me for decades. He's my friend.
Right. And, but I don't give my wife that.
What do these towels mean? Right. Or like, like what is happening in this house? Like, oh, there's a dish in the dishwasher.
What is she trying to tell me? Right. And we make this huge character assassination.
We just, it's madness. I don't even, so I don't think it, it i think what's happening on the internet is a 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 uh i i've got value too right i can get value by burning everybody the ground inside my own house our self-worth stands on the shoulders of other people's shortcoming that's it that's it instead of exhaling saying when i walk in the door there's a pile of towels good god what her what what must have her day been like just 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 up? 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 that they feel like they need to fix? Yeah, I think that old adage in marriage therapy is true.
You marry your unfinished business i think the 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 and 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 are 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 try to solve that situation again and you do it again i was just talking to somebody in the outside of the grocery store 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 a seven-year-old is not the problem seven-year-old 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 primaryaker, 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 their caregivers. So they just learn to cope.
They learn to solve it. Yeah.
They learn 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 to sing and dance and get it right i've got to perform i remember uh 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 uh this he's like all right who's who's gonna struggle here where do we go and i said this one's gonna be okay and i said why and he goes well he's performing well he's doing grades 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 you will be you 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 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. But others will be really good on that T-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. Some don't have a good balance of desire for more and running away from past trauma and all the rest of the 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 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 banners and the rafters and again i'm sitting'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.
The issue is with them, not with the thing that they've been given, the fuel. That's right.
Yeah, I think... And dude, I'm doing the same thing.
Like 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? Right? I got right on it, man. It is, dude, it just taps in, man.
You fucking, we both do need to act. But yeah, I think, you know, 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? Can I solve this? Of course.
Because a lot of us like fixing problems. 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 likable? 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 solve the problem.
Of course. If we can fix them as well, maybe it means that we're fixable too.
Like in their mistreatment of us, we see reflected the same level of mistreatment that we give ourselves. Right.
Right. Right.
Like 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 in time as well.
I think, uh, you know, the, the weirdest element of this that I was thinking about was variable schedule reward. So the way that slot machines and just that, when you see someone that's in a crazy relationship, turbulent 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 you don't know what you're going to wake up to today it's like if you don't know what you're going to wake up to today that might be really painful but you 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. Dope means a hell of a drug.
Well, and we've, I actually came to her book through you, Louise Perry's book. No, no, she was on again this week.
There's a quote in that book that has just bounced around inside my head it's haunted me but it's about have we solved for so many existential issues that plagued humanity forever that we're simply we're bored to death oh this is the exact maslow's hierarchy of needs thing yeah but see i i have a man i have an unsubstantiated uh hypothesis about even that maslow's hierarchy we can talk about all right but i think 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 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 that may expect me not may 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.
Expands, okay. So 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 uh climate related deaths have decreased by 50 times it's like 98 drop in the last 100 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 a climate crisis means and that's not to say that there isn't a fucking problem with the climate.
Of course, sketchy. But yeah, 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 problems yeah yeah and uh 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 she'll gently pat the table or pat my leg when i get off into and then in syria we're right here we're in nashville we're in nashville and it's such a such yeah, I can solve this one today. Thank you.
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 don't think of myself that highly and this person isn't treating me that highly either, but they're treating me.
Yeah. And it sounds like a cliche thing that I'm always, nobody's going to 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, right? Dave Ramsey's built an empire on living less than you make. And it's like, that's insane, right? It's madness.
It's just math, dude, right? But we create all these other alternate realities to make ourselves go, because I don't even think I'm worth the hard math. A quick aside, if you're anything like me, packing for a weekend trip somehow takes longer than the trip itself, which is why I've partnered with Nomadic, because this backpack is the best, most beautiful, most life-changing piece of luggage that I've ever found.
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That's nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. Yeah.
I mean, look, we accept the love that we think we deserve. There you go.
And that's the problem. Yeah.
Because this is why you see people who are consistently in the same sorts of relationship it's intellectual cutting yeah it's intellectual self-harm oh right yeah i'm not worth it yeah i've got it whip myself into submission yeah i want to ask you can i 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 coexist on top of these things.
I think they are interwoven. Okay.
And I think that we may have 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 they're we're all going to become this little lighthouse on the hill i just don't think that i think we're at the end of self-actualization this this notion that we can somehow be set be all be little lighthouses on a hill i don't think that's 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 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, right? 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. Exactly, yes.
Is that what you're talking, 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 these bottom wrongs there's an expectation that they're going to exist for us so that i can get to the the more important stuff of sitting in a room and thinking about how great i am oh yeah or painting all food painting a whole food just got that sorted the police have got safety sorted yeah so 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 contribution to the world yeah 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 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 want to make moms great again the day or the dad who dude doesn't do the job that we do.
He goes up and down 5th and 6th Street collecting trash day after day after day, year after year after year. You don't do that and then hopefully you can get some self-actualization on the side.
You're going to 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 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 i mean two people that i think of tucker max and ryan holiday both of whom live in opposite directions out here from austin uh two people who big businesses very successful authors well-known renown 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 sheeps got stuck and blah blah blah yeah well? It's because chopping wood and carrying water actually gives you a sense of satisfaction that it's hard to

find elsewhere. But 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, so it needs 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,

Thank you. have a little bit of agency or self-determination to the sort of work that they do so they 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 you know independent contractor or something like that and um i've been thinking a lot about bands and the way that bands um they have to work very hard but it's a very enjoyable uh career and performing and concerts rank as some of the highest happiness pursuits that you can do.
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're you know 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 yeah to be able to i don't just mean like coming home to your wife and her going no thank good for you honey or whatever it might be but a good thing happens and you have someone that you can go, ah, that's fucking sick. You know what I mean? Like, and it wasn't your wife in that moment, but it was your manager.
That's right. 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 bookings, who would you have screamed to? Yeah. I would have pumped my fist and been like, cool.
And forgotten about it. Right.
You've got this memory. That's right.
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 to the day i die right i'll remember that to 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 and music that's got a pretty tight feedback loop to it exactly well 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 uh just one 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 own 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 siloed you off from being able to do the thing that you actually wanted to do, which was enjoy the fucking process.
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 it in fucking Bali. Because who, 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 going to use our software.
Dude, you just made 20 grand. Right.
You just made 20 grand. Oh, it's just me that made 20 grand.
Who am I going to celebrate with? celebrate with and i'm fired up kind of but i'm not that fired up because the whole the whole reason that you want to win something is so that you can go with other people that's the wolf of wall street dicaprio's character it looks like he's he's addicted to the deal i don't think he was i think he was addicted to the room cheering yeah you know what i mean to that to that celebration and the deal gets you that right yes yes so that becomes the proxy and all the money is it's just the number that you get to like shout in the air with everybody else that's it that's it in the awe and the oh my gosh how'd you do that that's amazing so a perfect example of this i'm gonna go and do uh 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 uh so as a part of that i'm gonna get to i i don't need a warm-up right it's two hours of me talking on stage i'm gonna take a warm-up because i want someone to finish the show with and fucking high-five and it might be Zach, my ex-housemate who plays guitar

it might be James Smith from Australia

it might be somebody

I might get guests to come and do warm-up

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?

I've got friends who are DJs

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 something and the next time he got to sleep in a bed was saturday so it's monday to saturday he played four gigs over five time zones of whatever it was and uh he ended up basically having like a small psychotic break talked about it on the podcast years ago now and uh he had to say he came to in a supermarket sat on the floor and he had laid around him one of every different type of hair product he'd been scooping it up and putting it on his head because he realized his hair was shit yeah he grabbed a floret of broccoli 48 dishwasher tablets and walked out like he had a full yeah you know part part psychotic break. You think, huh, that doesn't sound fun.

But from the outside, it's, oh my God, he's living his dream.

He gets to play his music around the world.

Like careful what you wish.

Comes at a cost, man.

Yeah.

Especially on your own.

Yeah.

There's always a trade.

There's always a trade.

Talking about, I guess, 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? 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 kind of we 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 and 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 uh 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 uh 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 isn't 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 then 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 want question of ourselves and of our partner that we cast it all as needs right because the want can be denied that's right but the need can't the most want should it could be denied but the need should not if you deny my needs you're an ass if you deny my wants because you might not want 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 the this and i got to clean the kitchen which is unbelievably sexy i'll get you off and then i'm gonna go 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 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 bath water but i think most of this comes down to want and that's terrifying that's an awesome reframe that's really 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. Yeah.
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 going to 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 purest... Yeah.
Before the world soils you... Right, okay.
Write down your... This is actually what you're really going to want.
Your 10 non-negotiables. Gotcha.
I'm 26 years with the same person, the same woman, and I think she had two of the 10, and one of them was be a pretty girl right like be

a beautiful woman and so it's what when i say i want something so often my managers that's his

job is 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 in the form of a need that you have to meet it

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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, you know, it goes back to what do you think you deserve? And if.
We don't have a, 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, but just pat you on the back, you don't think you're worthy of wanting anything. Everything has to be a need.
Well, also, what was the model of needs and wants and desires being requested and fulfilled in the household? Because, you know, 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. You know, 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 a party. You weren't invited.
Right. Yes.
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? Like, 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 uh 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 uh i think there's a practical aspect to this and then i think there's a relational aspect to this if um there's a very real um 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 gotta get out of this there's a very real math problem you have to solve. And that's unfortunate and it's scary and the social services are pretty tough, but there's a very real question.
I suppose that the equivalent would be the same for men, but in reverse paying alimony. 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 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 or 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 um i often are in our in our Lone Ranger Cowboy world we live in, man.
It's, you gotta know all this,

but I'll do this by yourself and so i'm constantly telling people dude go get a cup of coffee with somebody and just exhale and then tell them 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 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 and call me back like you're all you'll have survival sex y'all are figuring this thing out like you're not broke and it's okay right um but that's just you just need somebody to sit with you um but when it comes to courage and bravery i think at some point we have to head to head into the discomfort. I mean, that's all Judd Brewer stuff on anxiety, right? You got to head into it.
The thing that you're scared about and anxious about. We'll get back to talking to John in just one minute.
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Yeah, I think some of the questions I've asked friends about

when they've been on the fence,

unsure, scared about being alone, about losing this attachment. You know, one of the things is how much of your life is thinking about this breakup taking up? Like what other productive or peaceful or mindful thoughts is this taking the space of?

Yeah.

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? 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 they're, if their shoulders drop, if their face drops, that may be the right move.
Yeah. And if they tense up, no, no, no, no.
Yeah. They've got a sense of relief from, 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, uh, for permission there's this great uh you know rick hansen he wrote hardwiring happiness dude unreal okay imagine cbt meets uh dharma wisdom meets mindfulness meets neuroscience it's a hardwiring happiness by rick hansen he's got a phenomenal phenomenal uh 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, yeah. Right, because losing an abusive partner isn't, you're not fearing that, you're fearing the uncertainty of what it would be like to be without them.
You know, we have two needs as humans. We have an exploration need and we have a security need, right? Their intention right correct their novelty and yeah yeah yeah yeah uh novelty safety yeah 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 it might kill you um 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 okay in different situations.
And yeah, you know, 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, you know, have different life opportunities to move away from the town. They are probably quite hard workers.
And the problem with being a hard worker is that you have to have a pain tolerance. And if your pain tolerance is quite high, that means that your pain tolerance for 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.

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. Yeah.
And coming out the other side and going, 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 a 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, there's 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 well-being and perhaps downstream from that you get some like fun and enjoyment and happiness and 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 the inevitable outcome and i remember when my wife and i were sitting across the table uh like the message i sent to her because we were speaking was no no no crying no no crying, no fighting, no screaming.
And this was self-directed. I'm the emotional one.
Um, we gotta, we gotta say, are we still doing this? Is it like, cause the marriage we've had up to now is over. Like, are we going to keep doing this? And, 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 suffer in silence. I think that's a, that is, I don't think it's that binary.
I think you can also both be like, 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 a it's 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 to something magnanimous, um, which is very on Romeo and Juliet, right? You're supposed to just be star cross 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 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 she loves them. Yeah.
Right? And it's a different kind of depth, 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 lean 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 buttons i didn't even know i had she just knows and she screaming and hollering and yelling and doing her 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 what arthur brooks is ringing in my head and you turn around you walk back in and i went climbed into bed with her and my wife's reading a book and I just climbed.
Sheves me out of the way i move and 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 that's about to begin it's my in a nine-year-old. That's right.
Dude. Was it who?

It may have been it may have been sal de stefano that i called recently and was like hey i'm having a disagreement with my 14 year old and he just started dying laughing because i was gonna stop you right there and i was like what am i what am i doing and i was like i'll call it no it was lane norton i called him i was like hey i'm arguing my 14 year old he goes how about i just stop you right there and i was like what do i do right yeah i use this for a living it happens yeah right that's fucking funny and then you uh 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 pin? And 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.
You go, any other reasonable person would have said this is too much, even the best of the people which are the people presumably that i admire because i think what 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 that's it oh my god because i was wracked 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 got to have a fucking blame on people that's right um but i thought it was me being petty i thought it was me being juvenile i thought i was being rash uh and someone goes you're not crazy you're're not crazy for feeling like that. I think that's completely an acceptable position to hold.
Fuck. Well, what do I do now? I actually have a firm...
Because you get stuck in, are my desires legitimate? Should I be able to... Is it okay to want what I you know, if you've had a life of marshmallow testing your way through things, you have learned to not want what you want.
That's it. 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 going to feel a certain way. Right? when if i get what i want that suddenly it's going to extrinsically fill that gap oh yeah in my chest and i think when 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 never said before because like i know these things 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 and that's a lot of a lot of people especially now uh you know what do you say physiologically decapitated from the neck down i love that uh you know they just exist and you know this is me speaking to me as I desperately tried to get more embodied with, 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 Conor 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, you familiar with him, art of Accomplishment, going on a seven-day retreat, the back end of September with him, called Groundbreakers. And they've got clinical studies showing that it moves neuroticism longitudinally, nudges neuroticism in the direction that you want it to.
It makes a bunch of other personality changes. But he's like, it's like Navy SEAL Hell Week for your your emotions so don't book anything for the next week yeah and uh i'm really excited i'm gonna get daunted as i get closer to it um but yeah man it's a one of the most interesting questions talking about wants um is what do you want to want yeah i adore that question It's an essay by Kyle Eschenroda from years ago.

His website has now been taken over

by like a Ukrainian porn thing.

You know, someone's got a hold of the WordPress logins

and they've changed his website.

But I downloaded the PDF,

so I revisited it pretty regularly.

And yeah, the question of what do you want to want?

You know, because your desires define the path of least resistance that your life is going to take. And a lot of the time people...
Wait, unpack that. So the things that you want, your desires, will pull you in a direction that is the easiest for you to go.
Even if that is very difficult. Even if it's very difficult.
Yeah, of course. Okay.
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 work more further than the man who is forced to walk or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Your desires define the path 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.
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, by society at large, and by the way that you 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 want that I'm here. I want you to be happy that I'm here.
I want my daughter to come running at me. Like she had a- Daddy, daddy, daddy.
With like a uh inside of a wrapping paper roll i'm always in this sword fight with her i don't even know i'm right 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?

What a great question.

And let's reverse engineer that.

Who the fuck's your wife?

She's Yoda, dude.

Yeah.

She's a Yoda.

Absolutely.

She's just a wise, still.

I didn't realize that you were

the relationally retarded one.

Oh, are you kidding me?

Yeah, dude. The guy that's got the calling show is the one that actually doesn't know anything but she never would have been at a punk rock mosh pit if it wasn't for me so there you go very important we each bring her pieces to the relationship yeah um okay taking one step forward uh what is your advice for how people can better move on from breakups they've got this 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 an 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. And now we outsource that and we call it the living room.
I think it was a 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 that's 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 the water is just only three feet deep, right? And we've just, 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 was 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 want to go out. Your body's working right if you don't, like, stay under the covers for a while, your body's working right.
If you don't want to go out,

your body's working right. If you don't like,

if you're like wondering,

am I lovable?

That's not something to be solved,

man.

That's something to sit with.

And if you don't have people in your life,

man,

your body's going to spin out on you,

dude.

Cause it knows it can't carry that burden alone.

That's 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 going to block people.
I'm going to delete people. I'm going to take my phone off.
I'm going to have a group of people that are going to come to my house every, every night for two weeks. I'm going to play stupid board games, something stupid, right? Or whatever.
Um, I'm going to give myself permission to not go out for a month because i'm tired i just feel dry like man that's just that's called just honoring the system man you know what i mean it's honor the system because you're gonna duct tape over that thing in counseling we we say it's called call it leakage it'll find a way out and it usually finds a way out at a 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 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 car next to you doesn't even matter if they were just yeah if you start making up imaginary stories about people like the uh 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 gonna tell that dude that you're never gonna do that it's your body just trying to spin up uh bernie 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 just have a 15 minute argument with you dude and i by the way i crushed you in that argument yeah it's

insane yeah where you see your boss the next day after a night of like i'm gonna tell you're not gonna tell him anything right so it's when you go into solution solving mode uprage fighting running hiding man we broke up we We had plans. I'm going to sit here.
Hey, this is going to be weird. Will you come over to my house, bring tacos, and I'm not going to talk to you because it's going to be weird.
So I'm just going to sit here. We're going to play video games, right? You can watch a stupid game with me.
I'm going to a show. I bought two tickets.
We're going to the show. No asking me about so-and-so, but we're just going to go.
You're too old to be mosh pinning, John. I know.
We're going anyway, right? And it's just honoring. You're supposed to be sad.
You're supposed to be sad. And then if you wake up 90 days later and it becomes, you're skipping work, you need to call somebody, right? That's when it becomes a pathology.
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That's E-I-G-H-T sleep.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout i seem to remember in uh lost connections johan harry's book yeah man what a great book uh that there's a carve out in the dsm for grief around depression yeah which to me undermines the whole dude don't get me started on dsm 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.

You all,

okay,

the emotion might be that of depression,

right?

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 was a cluster of symptoms, right? That's it.
It's 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 in your head. All those things are right.
Your dad died. There's not a, there's not a, it's David Kessler, who I think is the world's foremost guru in grief.
He says it's like a fingerprint, man. Everybody looks different.
And that's why we're trying to solve it. Human, I spoke to 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. Yeah.
And there is always this sort of rumination, this potential, this, so I think, you know, that's why it sounds cheesy, but I always recommend somebody have a ceremony. Okay.
Like a funeral relationship. Yeah.
And that can be like sex in the city, like this big glory. It doesn't have to be that, but it is, uh, and I love Kessler also says grief demands a witness.
Can't gr by yourself you just biochemically you can't do it by yourself you got to 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 hung over a little bit exhausted uh 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 she's not I'm not calling her I'm gonna pick up my phone it's gonna be no text it's so interesting the ceremony yeah you have to but you have to give your body a 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 that circuitry that gets reused was 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 you're like, hey, that was abuse. And they're like, you 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, uh, uh, during me too, where, huh? That wasn't, that wasn't so dialed that he touched me like that.
Well, it was like, well, it's like, he's a great dad. We have three kids.
He's a good provider. Good husband.
We have great time. Hey, I think that was right back in college.
What do I do now? Right. God.
And it's, uh, yeah 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 of doing any kind of introspection that you start turning over these rocks or looking through i'm going to

open these doors inside of this house i've lived in my entire life and then you realize that every so often you open one and there's a fucking demon hiding in there covered in shit yeah well and i wonder if we man if we can get on a whole rabbit hole in this let's prefer another show i i remember my high school metal band.

We played at this event at the end of our

senior year called uh it's called mike stock it was an old skating rink and chris to say that we crushed it bro i'm talking legend any record exec on planet earth would have 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 did we pile around the TV? Yo, it was not good.

It was so bad, dude. I forgot the words.
It was a disaster. It was, 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 of 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 man we're we're just we're playing roulette with our nervous system strange right because in one we're not designed 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 Mastriani has this thing where he says, the closest thing to an equation in psychology is tragedy plus time equals comedy.
And, uh, 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, it doesn't act as though it's happening again. Let's say, uh, but you, you experienced it with your psychoanalysis, right? 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 best book on attachment that i've ever listened to only exist as an audiobook to your brain on love by stan tatkin fucking outstanding okay and he talks about how um 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 feeding it and feeding it and feeding it and um yeah what you want to do is like clear that shit out so yes he has two really great uh bits of advice for 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, your 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 you respect or just a friend or a family member or something and 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 yeah because the longer that you leave that is it unspoken expectations are premeditated resentment that's it yeah and that gets ported over into long-term memory and that's going to stick about the other 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 it because you're not going to be able to get rid of it 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 um if you see it from a first person perspective yeah if you're watching it through your own eyes as opposed to sort of watching it from above and behind um 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 gonna I guess'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 won right yeah it's fantastic like hey john we're all right what are you gonna do about this yeah yeah instead of what am i what am i what am i all right john you messed up john you should go tell her you're sorry. I need to tell her I'm sorry.
And man, we're off 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 in my, earlier on in my life, I think that was like,

kind of messed up and, huh, I haven't really dealt with that thing. And I think it's still

playing on 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.
And 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 like going to your parent or to your partner who may have done the thing because they're going to instantly have to defend themselves.
And man, that, that cascade is, is messy. So that's when you get a trusted friend or a, or a counselor just to say, this happened.
Going back to what you said earlier, am I crazy? And somebody might say, yeah, a good friend will say, yeah, you're kind of crazy. It's not a big deal.
Um, uh, or just, I sat with a counselor recently and she was like no that's a big that's a big one what about it's a big deal what about something which is not quite if that's a nine or a ten right what about what about stuff that's fives that's write it 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 like descriptively what are you doing are you are you reliving it 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 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 gonna hurt somebody right so some of that is and then uh gosh what's the guy he 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? Oh, I do that now with a guy named Luke Lefevre. They give you prompts and then they have you think through it and they have you exhale for a bit and

they have you write 10 minutes freestyle this is like guided journaling it's not like you're

you're not sitting with another no no no yeah yeah yeah right oh that's cool and what's that called

it's just a it's just a thing he does but uh he called his name's luke lefevre okay he's out of

national online course he's out of national yeah yeah yeah um but he's a guy that always he's always

pushed journaling and push journaling and push journaling and i always kind of roll my eyes like I'm a grown man.

I don't need a diary.

Right.

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I knew the, the, I knew the, the therapeutic literature about like 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 and no point it's all next happening into emotions yeah yeah so there's a i mean that's awesome and i is there a name of his course do you know it's a i don't um i can send it to you cool yeah but it's excellent yeah so rick is is really really good with this as well rick hanson from Hardwaring Happiness.
And what he has is the HEAL framework.

So have, enrich, absorb, and then optionally link at the end.

So have a good experience.

So a good opportunity right now might be,

fuck, it's the first time I've met John and like, I'm really enjoying this.

And I feel competent and that's really fucking nice.

This is my job.

This is my life.

Yeah, we're at work right now.

Millions of people that get to listen to this.

And I really hope it's helping them.

Thank you. that's really fucking nice.
This is my, this is my job. This is my life.
Yeah. We're at work right now.
Yeah. 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. 30 seconds to a minute is really good.
And then you have absorb. And absorb is imagine the experience sinking down and becoming a part of you.
So I think that's a little bit more embodied, right? So you've got, oh, this is nice. And I'm kind of up here and I'm enriched.
I'm sort of feeling it's expanding. And I'm sort of sitting in it.
And then absorb, it's like sinking down into me and that's becoming a part of me. And I think you can do this, I mentioned before,

and 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 20s until a couple of years ago.

But a lot of it just ended up being homework.

It's like admin.

That's it.

And I'm like, I'm just paying fucking,

in retrospect, I thought I was doing the thing

and I can't, I shouldn't shout at a previous version of me who did the thing he thought he was supposed to be doing yeah but i was largely just like filing stuff um whereas now and this is half tony robbins half rick hansen and i've dispensed with most of the other stuff from journaling on a morning and just three things that you're grateful for but as opposed to just writing them down like take one minute for each thing and just really so i had a call with my best friend the guy who's um best man i was at his wedding i had a call with him yesterday for like 45 minutes i was like i fucking love zach like he always listens he's always got awesome advice he's in a good mood all the time he's really receptive uh he's so fun like he really cares he really cares about me that's so nice and you like allowing that and sense i think fuck that took a minute to do what was the other one the the fresh air this morning just smelled awesome like coming through the window in front of my bedroom smells so good like it's really really refreshing what was the other one uh uh i developed uh bravery and courage to overcome difficult things and i wouldn't have done that previously i think 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 you know i finished that and i was like i only had three minutes before the gym in any case i was like that was so fucking nice what a lovely way to start yeah and uh yeah 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 correct what did i do yeah what was my what was my my, what was my upper down? Yeah. Yeah.
That's a P&L. That's exactly right.
Uh, a buddy of mine's going to a retreat right now and his wife 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 bebopping in just you know in his underwear and like hey dad like i said hey i want you to read this i'm gonna read this to you out loud this is me this is a letter i'm writing to my friend i want him to hear what 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 and you know and okay I just have to hope it's downloading.
It was like, I had this big spiritual moment and he's like, all right, dad, he's upside down on my, on that little teeter thing, just hanging there. Um, but man, it, it lifted my spirits to know I got a friend that good.
I got a friend that good man. And so maybe, maybe that's an important exercise, but it takes you back.
Right. He's the guy I called my wife when i did labor i don't know what to do man um 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, but it took me back to those moments.
Just 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 x alexithymia like it's so common now among men to not feel feelings that it's got a fucking name um and yeah it's like that's like spray painting your uh your dashboard like that doesn't make you tough on your cool texas pickup truck just spray paint it black i don't need these gauges what a a moron.
That's dumb. You're going to ride a gas and get a wreck.
Yeah. Right.
And also, if you drive constantly looking at your dashboard, you're going to crash too. Right.
Gosh, man. I just don't, I don't, I don't get, and you're in this world more than me.
I just, I don't understand the, the tribal disassociation from reality. It's just so strange.
I don't, 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 so like insanely sensational that it becomes you get what i'm saying yeah i do understand i 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 needievers 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 type b problems like oh my god sorry you've just got too much discipline like you keep winning the marshmallow test all the time no one's going to give you sympathy for this and but they'll see your heart attack from space oh of course right but it sounds like if you are a david goganzy 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 the girl and everything's great right there are no movies about how to log out of slack at 6 p.m or learn to spend a day under a tree yeah right because that sounds opulent and bourgeois and privileged and a champagne problem like dude just just chill out no one gets told to just work harder it's like, 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 aberration.
But that's not the case. For a lot of people, that's not the case.
A lot of people- It'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 four montage correct it's just 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 you know what stuck it out but it looks cool 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.
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. I mean, you will see.
A few years ago, I joined just a local, you got to be kidding me, like church league basketball. And my knees were like, no, bro, we had a deal.
Yeah, we're going to stop. And, yeah, it was two surgeries worth, man.
But, like, we had a contract. But I was like, no, 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 by far so i played cricket until i was 2021 i got my grades reduced to get into the university i got into because i was going to go and play at a high level for them it was i'd done everything yeah uh 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 like 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, look, 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 like you know avoid the rain going from the car to the house don't try to stop well because you're gonna fuck something up but we do it with everything we do it drugs we do it relationships oh yeah like if people who abstain from cocaine oh i'm gonna fucking run this back watch me i'm gonna i'm gonna start where i ended yeah exactly yeah this is it's essentially like i press pause on a video game and the like sniffer 1000 video game and then i'm gonna immediately rebegin you're going to the gym taking a break everybody knows or marriage right you get out of 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 uh dude you're fucking awesome well you're absolutely awesome and i can't wait to have you back on and today was so much fun and uh where should people go they want to 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 uh um 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.

I don't know,

I guess.

And that's not me blowing smoke.

Cause I'm going to,

I'll bait and switch here in a second,

but I'm going to like,

tell me about that.

I got interested in it. 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 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 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 and the world around me. And I think that EP gives us a really wonderful look into it.
And then you can look at human behavioral ecology, you can look at evolutionary biology um but i just found it so compelling that i didn't stop and then i spoke at hbess i spoke at the human behavioral evolutionary society in palm springs um i gave it i was part of a symposium there i'm about to get my first uh I don't know what it is, citation authorship on a

study. Yeah, congratulations, man.
So this is going to be cool. I'm going to do this with Candice Blake and Mack and Murphy about, I have a theory that people who are in shape will be more threatened by potential as MPQs than people who are out of shape.
Absolutely. Despite the fact that people who are out of shape would be having their true selves denied as the fat acceptance movement falls away.
You know, Lizzo's in moderately all right shape now. I don't know whether you've seen it.
She's lost, it must be over 100 pounds. So she looks very different.
But the reason being that if you are someone who's quote-unquote in shape, I'm aware that Ozempic doesn't make you in shape, it just makes you skinny, but if you're someone who's in shape, your fitness signal is being derogated, it's being attacked 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 EP, and if anyone's bringing out a new book, I just had Bill von Hippel on. He's fantastic.
I guess evolutionary anthropology, technically. So I'm still balls deep in it.
Just did a great conversation with Matt Ridley about birds, sex, and 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.
So can you point to something that EP has given you 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 profound. What is the insight and the knowledge given you? I think understanding that 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 one good example so basically um your pathologies are not some unique idiosyncratic issue the only you deal with they're endemic and they're a part of being a human that would be like kind of i guess they're not characterological yes yeah yeah. Yes.
Yeah, yeah, 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, right?

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 there was something that was an indication that my marriage was broken because I found other women attractive.
I wasn't going to cheat on my partner. 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 going to see other women that are attractive as attractive.
And you have a system that's inbuilt in you that you do not have control over. And that, okay.
so when I don't eat for a while i get hungry sense uh but for every you know behavior for a lot of things it just makes me feel like oh i'm you know the the things that i struggle with aren't some personal deficiency yeah they are just part and parcel of you being you. Huh.
That's fantastic. Hmm.
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 want to talk about this, and that's fine. I've been wrestling with the weight.
And 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, and you're at 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 a huckster on every corner saying,'s why you feel this way here's why you feel this way here's why you feel this way i'm wondering if there's not something on the squat bar there's just so much weight and i 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 and body 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 um if there's something in chris's body that's saying this thing's gotten really heavy yeah that's a good question um yeah perhaps uh your 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 yeah the weight of somebody going to war with their body going to war with them right yeah i mean look it's been a rough 12 months physically for me uh america is a fantastic country but it tries to kill everybody that enters it. Every one of them.
But that way it can sell you a cure. That's good.
Yeah, the food, the water, the air, the building materials, everything, the cars, the fucking everything. And perhaps, I mean, 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 a way here's a way to look at it um most people are stuck most people that are hard charging 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 best seller but let's look over the shoulder of it as i'm receiving it correct to ask what's next um and you know i in some ways this is very early because i'm still in it right i haven't fixed it and i 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 uh taking pleasure in simpler things um because when your capacity gets restricted and this is for anybody that's going through health problems um 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 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 uh i love homo he's a fantastic friend um 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 two, if I had an angel and a demon sat on either shoulder, the angel would be Chris Bumstead and the demon would be Alex Hormose. 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 i'm way more in the sebum energy than i am in the homosey energy in 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 that 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 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.
That's it. That's it.
you you 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.
You go, at no point have you arrived. It's like running toward a mirage.
Every step you take toward the horizon, the horizon moves one further step step away from you and um yeah the only fucking way to like win any game is to stop first off stop moving the goal posts because if every time you try and fucking kick the ball toward it and it goes about to cross the line and then you like move the goal another 100 yards back well that's not going to work so i'm very much in my at least trying to embrace my sort of slower more considered energy um really like really really hard trying to not take the same levels of satisfaction and dopamine from uh like chaotic busyness,

what you should be trying to do is move your life

toward an outcome that you want.

And you 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 and 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 want to 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 not a psychology for what if I'm not needed. It'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 coat for a week. 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 the, you know, how are you you dealing with uh like is it pressure of doing all of the stuff causing stuff to arise in your body perhaps um and you know it's too late to fucking turn it around now so i'm just doing my best i'm doing it's a realization you know i said to uh the fuck was i talking to about this i can't remember who i was talking to i do know i do know who i was talking to ceo of one of the companies that i work with and uh he's about to have a kid and he was saying hey man i am like my drive's dropping a bit i was like you're doing your wife's eight months pregnant it's like yeah and i was like well you know the science on this testosterone drops in men when they get into a relationship it drops again when they get when the wife gets pregnant they're about to give birth like you know that that's your kid like you're you're ready for this to happen 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 uh 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 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, okay, 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. All right, what's left? Like, who am I deep down? Who am I now? Yeah.
One of my values and my virtues when I'm not quite as flamboyant as I usually am.

And do people still like me?

Do I still like me? And 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 8 p.m every night and when i'm tired all the time and when i my mood's not right and when i need to rely on people more like i think that's like i think that's a good person so and i don't think that i would have realized that or i don't think i would have known that uh if i hadn't happened that's fantastic or that chris is 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 awesome dude i can't wait to bring you back on appreciate you man you're fucking great where should people go they want to check out all of the stuff um i've got uh i co-host the ramsey show with dave ramsey talking money.
And then I got my Dr. John Deloney show.

It's like old Dr. Laura show.

People call in mental health and marriage problems

and we get them solved.

It's awesome.

Everyone should go and subscribe.

Dude, until next time.

Appreciate you.

Thank you, brother.